Architectural Housing Styles
Queen Anne Cottage
1883 — 1890s
The Queen Anne Cottage is a one-story building practically consumed by an oversized gable. A veritable billboard for textural effect, the ornate gable may be clothed in decorative shingles, framed with intricate bargeboard, pierced by flashed glass windows, stamped with a sunburst, and topped with a proud finial. A less elaborate gable might only have scalloped shingles, a perimeter of dentils, and a modest topknot.
The gable overwhelms the front bay window, and this arrangement of volumes creates cut-away corners and a recessed porch. For each of these new architectonic features, special ornamentation evolved. At the corner, spindled brackets support the overhang, and a pendant--a turned, wooden tear drop, the opposite of a finial--punctuates the projection. The porch has a circular arch (Queen Annes show a fondness for circular forms) which reaches from the bay window to rest on a single column. The column represents no single motif, but, like the Queen Anne itself, is a mixture of styles, as its beaded base, truncated shaft and ad-hoc capital indicate.
In fact, the Queen Anne style is such an unabashed composite of borrowed elements that it behooves the owner to read about the other Victorian types as well.
The floor plan of the Queen Anne Cottage is not as palatial as the countrified Queen Anne style. The limitations of rectangular urban lots and working men's budgets combined to condense the sprawl of gables and turrets into a more succinct package. The grand central living hall is reduced to a modest vestibule, but there is still no corridor. The rooms are arranged in succession like Italianate or San Francisco Stick, but the spaces merge together through spindled archways.
Excerpt from "Rehab Right - How to Rehabilitate Your Oakland House Without Sacrificing Architectural Assets"