My Love Affair with Italianate Homes

The Italianate style is by far my most favorite.

Ugh. Just so beautiful!

For me, it’s the tall, arched windows and the symmetry of the building when they line up with the matching arches of the front door. It’s the quoins that line the sides of the façade imitating stone from the Italian Villas and the Northern Italian vernacular architecture. It’s the seamless blending of the romantic shapes of the style with various other styles that came before and after this extraordinary season of architecture.

As many of the styles before this era had done before (since it took time to spread to the newer cities down South and then eventually out West), the Italianate movement started in the 1840s on the East Coast and was built through the 1880s for many different housing types. It was widely popular in the U.S. and I love seeing the variations in our own vernacular architecture throughout the states.

The characteristics in a short list:

• built between the 1840s-1880s

• tall, arched window glass *this is often my first clue

• brackets visually support horizontally protruding eaves

• corners of the façade feature quoins, which are wooden squares applied to the exterior to emulate the stone of the Italian Villas of Northern Italy