showing decorative features
ornamental, embellished
bearing shapes or decoration representing leaves
foliated
checkered or mosaic
-
like
tesselated
having a net
-
like pattern
reticulated
having sunken
(
usually
)
square or octagonal panels
(
lacunars or
lacunaria
)
in the ceiling
coffered
showing segments
(
as of a circle
)
as constructional pieces
segmented
having columns
columniated
having columnar grooves
fluted
without columns
astylar
having a colonnade
colonnaded
having a colonnade on all sides
peripteral, peristylar
having or painted in several colors
polychrome, multicolor
On the opposite side of the house, the living room fronts on a spectacular canyon view, breaking open with glass walls and a deep porch, recessed, however, to keep the taut wall line and provide shelter in any weather. Most striking of all is what has happened to the hipped roof, made unfamiliar by an oversized monitor skylight which creates a silhouette like a farmer’s broad-brimmed hat.
MARY Mix FOLEY,
The American House
Composite ranches feature irregular perimeter outlines. Thus they are characterized by degrees of irregular massing with L- and T-shapes the most prevalent forms.... Like other ranches, roofs are low-pitched except that multiple-gables, multiple-hip, and combined gable and hip roofs predominate.
JOHN JAKLE, ROBERT BASTIAN,
AND DOUGLAS MEYER,
Common Houses in America’s Small Towns
The suffused light I had detected seconds before goes out in a flicker, while a second, brighter alpenglow leaks through three sets of wooden shutters. There is no glass. I stare at a room unlike any I have seen. Thirty feet above the ground floor, mountain views all around. Crafted with fancy handiwork, Tibetan dragons, filigree, and crenelation.
MICHAEL TOBIAS,
Voice of the Planet
having stone masonry whose edges or joints are accentuated
(
by beveling
or rebating the blocks
)
rusticated
having a wall surface of wooden beams with masonry between them
half-timbered
sloping backward vertically or upward
(
as a wall
)
battered
built or supported with horizontal beams
trabeated
projecting horizontally beyond its stabilizing or anchoring support
cantilevered
left visible although a supporting feature
exposed
having vertical boards or strips as walls or siding
board-and-batten
arched or hollowed
(
as a ceiling
)
vaulted
having a vaulted ceiling like a tunnel or half-cylinder
barrel-vaulted
having a ceiling of intersecting vaults
groin-vaulted
in disrepair or crumbling
dilapidated, ramshackle, rickety, tumbledown
COMMON MODERN ARCHITECTURAL STYLES
Greek Revival
Commonly classical-temple-like rectangular blocks with a full-width front or entry portico with rounded or square columns and a flat or low roof above a wide band of trim. Usually no arches, no roof balustrade, no dormers, and no wings or projections on the building. Front door usually surrounded by narrow sidelights. Windows are small and inconspicuous.
The ceiling design is in large coffered bays corresponding to the buttresses, which are emphasized by the
pietra
serena pilasters resting on a string-course above the tops of the desks and supporting a narrow architrave below the ceiling.
LINDA MURRAY,
Michelangelo
The light of this southern fjord is not unlike the light of the Baltic; a pallid freshness is common to both cities; sitting snugly out of the sunlight in Sydney’s Strand Arcade, all fancy balustrades and tesselated paving, sometimes I almost expect to see the shoppers shaking the snow from their galoshes, breathing in their hands to restore the circulation and ordering themselves a schnapps.
JAN MORRIS,
Journeys
The flat roofs, azoteas, were protected by stone parapets, so that every house was a fortress. Sometimes these roofs resembled parterres of flowers, so thickly were they covered with them, but more frequently these were cultivated in broad terraced gardens, laid out between the edifices. Occasionally a great square or marketplace intervened, surrounded by its porticos of stone and stucco; or a pyramidal temple reared its colossal bulk, crowned with its tapering sanctuaries, and altars blazing with inextinguishable fires. The great street facing the southern causeway, unlike most others in the place, was wide, and extended some miles in nearly a straight line, as before noticed, through the centre of the city.
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT,
The History of the Conquest of Mexico
Church-like steeply pitched roofs and cross gables, pointed (Gothic) arches, and gables with decorative vergeboards. Sometimes flat roofs with castle-like parapets and usually a one-story full-width or entry porch. Structure basically of one color.
High Victorian Gothic
An eclectic variation of Gothic Revival, differing in being of many colors (polychrome), having details that are heavy rather than delicate or fragile in appearance, and having many overhanging or “top-heavy” gables and towers.
Queen Anne
An asymmetrical hodgepodge style of house, usually with a pre-eminent front-facing gable, a steeply pitched but irregular roof with numerous gables or turrets, any kind of window except a pointed-arch one, and a porch that extends to at least one side wall. Upper stories commonly project over the lower ones.
Italian Villa
An asymmetrical dwelling, and a square or octagonal, off-center or corner tower is typical, as are eaves projecting considerably, roofs that are flat or not steep, a veranda, and windows grouped in twos or threes.
Second Empire
A high mansard (double-sloped on all sides) roof is the giveaway, as are varied dormer windows, chimneys, and ornamental brackets beneath the eaves. Sometimes there is a central cupola or off-center tower.
Colonial Revival
There are many subtypes, and roofs vary, but common to most examples is a prominent, pedimented front porch and door with columns or pilasters and a fanlight or sidelights. The double-hung windows have many panes. Most but by no means all houses have symmetrical facades.
Keen to secure some photographs, I scaled the bank and climbed between the tensioned strands of the fence in sight on my right as I fought my way along the edge of the plantation for what I estimated to be about two hundred yards on a course roughly parallel to the road.
JOHN LISTER-KAYE,
The White Island
The next morning we cross over a notch and wind out way through thick fog across a suspension bridge that spans a fulminant torrent.
MICHAEL TOBIAS,
Voice of the Planet
The houses that adjoined this row of shops were small terraced cottages with front doors that opened straight into the front rooms, and a bare yard of space between the windows and the pavement. Their own house, though not much bigger, was more modern and semi-detached, with a pebble-dash facade and some decorative woodwork which his father, like their neighbours, kept brightly painted in two colours, green and cream.
DAVID LODGE,
Out of the Shelter
Imagine to yourself, my dear Letty, a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel; part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples and cascades ; porticoes, colonades [sic], and rotundos; adorned with pillars, statues, and painting....
TOBIAS SMOLLETT,
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
A simple, informal variety of Colonial Revival, typically a symmetrical white-painted brick two- or three-story house with a hip roof, double-hung windows (and shutters of the same size), and a chimney on one side; lacks the classical lines of the Georgian style.
Federal
(
Adam
)
A semicircular fanlight over the front door and windows with small panes are characteristic. Decorative moldings usually highlight the cornice. The house is most commonly a simple box, but it may also have curved or polygonal projections at the side or rear.
Saltbox Colonial
A simple shingle or clapboard rectangular house with a steep, lean-to-like roof (showing no windows) extending far down its rear, and with a large central chimney. The double-hung windows are small-paned.
Dutch Colonial
A one-story (or, occasionally, one-and-a-half story) dwelling with a side-gabled or side-gambreled roof that does not overhang far at the sides and small-paned double-hung windows. The entrance door a two-halved Dutch door unless replaced by a conventional door, and often an unsupported hood or roof over the entrance door.
Tudor
Usually a fortresslike stone-and-brick house with semihexagonal bays and turrets, high chimneys, tall leaded-glass casement windows (with stone mullions), and the well-known decorative half-timbering.
Spanish Colonial
Stucco-protected adobe brick or rubble stone is the distinctive material, and the flat or low-pitched red-tile roof is also distinctive. Small window openings have or originally had grilles and inside shutters. One or two stories. Elaborate ornamentation is sometimes found around openings, and a two-story building may have a pergola.
It is one of two evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted white, and which, with the delicate moldings of the cornice, form the sole and efficient decoration of the street front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS,
The Rise of Silas Lapham
The pretty Queen Anne house, with its pitted rosy-red bricks and its blunted grey stonework, stretched its bland length with a certain luxuriant confidence, surrendering itself to the garden whose proportions were perfectly attuned to its own. IRIS MURDOCH,
An Unofficial Rose
It was long and low built, with a pillared veranda and balcony all the way round. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD, “Prelude”
... I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel, however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it. MARY SHELLEY,
Frankenstein
It was in shape oblong, about 80 feet by 40, unmistakably ecclesiastical in feeling—two rows of wooden pillars, spaced at intervals of fifteen feet, rose to a vaulted ceiling 25 or 30 feet above the floor.
E. E. CUMMINGS,
The Enormous Room