Colorful, individualistic, and exuberant describe the Queen Anne style, the culmination of the elaborate architectural styles of the late 19th century. It received its first major exposure in America at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where the British government constructed several buildings in the style. The style caught on quickly. Numerous architectural pattern books provided the designs and in Vermont woodworking mills mass-produced turned porch posts, moldings, and other trim. This was the machine age and detail could easily be manufactured by skilled woodworkers. The feeling was--the more fanciful the better!

The Queen Anne style was used for houses, churches and other public buildings, and commercial blocks. Most buildings in the style are irregular in form, with hip, gable, or clipped gable (jerkinhead) roofs, and projecting bay windows, towers, and dormer windows. Wood-frame houses are sided with imaginative combinations of wood shingles with decoratively cut ends, clapboards, and vertical or horizontal boards dividing wall surfaces. Spacious porches have elaborately turned posts and balusters. Skirts below porch floors are made of latticework or vertical slats with fanciful cut-out designs.

Windows come in a variety of shapes and sizes and often contain panes of stained glass. Multi-colored paint schemes highlight the ornate trim.

The Queen Anne style "is ... a form that admits of the most comfortable and attractive arrangement of the interior, and above all, and what most concerns us, it furnishes an opportunity for the greatest display of taste in coloring and exterior decoration. The many fronts, diversified as to material, with visible framing, shingle or smooth covering, the gables, the porches, etc., all provide a means for the employment of parti-colored effects, the most attractive and artistically valuable feature of modern house painting, and one that the old box-pattern house, with its plain flat front, does not so readily admit of."

Vermont Heritage Network
Historic Preservation Program
Wheeler House, University of Vermont
Burlington, VT 05405
(802)656-3180
http://www.uvm.edu/~vhnet
E-mail To: vhnet@zoo.uvm.edu