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Click photo for larger image
In the East, brick is less common than wood as a bungalow cladding. Chilly year-round weather meant fewer windows and the eventual enclosing of the front porch.
Photo Courtesy of James C. Massey
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Eastern bungalows may be a bit less glamorous than their western cousins, but they were just as popular during their ca. 1905 to 1935 boom. Generally, eastern examples look firm-boned and somewhat chunky, with a less fluid quality than those in the West. They are also smaller and more rigidly geometric. These little houses tend to perch firmly on top of the land, rather than blend "organically" into their sites. Though they are undeniably bungalows—one-and-a-half-storeys, front porches, low lines—many have a decidedly cottagelike character.
That's not surprising, since the bungalow was most often designed to appeal to the tastes and pocketbooks of middle- and working-class owners in new trolley-car suburbs. Many belonged to first-time home buyers, a conservative group who valued the bungalow's coziness and low cost as much as its novelty. Although there are good examples of high-end bungalows in the East, these are relatively few—and, of course, none rivals Pasadena's Gamble House.
Meant for year-round living in chilly climates, these bungalows usually have fewer large windows and French doors (although they were still well supplied), and they almost never sport the slatted gable ventilators or wide-open sleeping porches found in Southern California. Their floor plans are compact, generally less amenable to indoor-outdoor living than those favored elsewhere, and the small rooms are laid out in conventional, often formal patterns.
The houses are most commonly of wood—either horizontal siding or shingles—but brick, stucco, or a combination of two or more of these materials can be found. In the East, stone and ornamental concrete blocks are usually reserved for foundations, porches, pillars, and posts, where they add a decorative element to a rather plain façade.
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Click photo for larger image
In the East, brick is less common than wood as a bungalow cladding. Chilly year-round weather meant fewer windows and the eventual enclosing of the front porch.
Photo Courtesy of James C. Massey
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Although hipped roofs are not unknown, most Eastern bungalow roofs are gabled—perhaps end-gabled, front-gabled, or even multigabled—with a broad sweep over the ubiquitous front porch and sometimes over a porte cochère as well. Dormers on the front, rear, and (often) sides denote intensive use of the attic for bedrooms.
Porch roofs often smoothly follow the slope of the main roof, but there might be a barely discernible break between porch and house—though nothing like the dramatic swoosh of western examples. Sometimes the porch has its own front-facing gable. Porches often sport plain, boxed posts; round columns (chubby in some Arts & Crafts-influenced houses, slim in those with Colonial Revival aspirations); or, less often, Prairie-style battered columns. The porch might have a single broad, open span, with large posts at the corners only, or it might be in three or four bays with multiple posts. As with
bungalows elsewhere, eastern porches very often include one or more sturdy, flat-topped, truncated pillars for displaying pots of flowers or greenery—a token effort towards outdoor living.
Interior ornament in eastern bungalows is restrained, with relatively little stained glass and fewer beamed ceilings and paneled wood walls than elsewhere. The fireplace is usually of brick, although rounded stones are a popular alternative material, and the mantel most often is in a simple, blocky Arts & Crafts or Mission style.
Just how popular were bungalows in the East? As the evidence shows, very popular indeed. But in eastern communities that were already well established—if not built out—by 1910, the bungalow was always just one among many building choices, and it never achieved quite the center-stage cachet it enjoyed in the West.
James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, OHJ's long-time architectural historians and the
authors of House Styles in America, are based in Strasburg, Virginia.
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