Melrose Spotlight: the Shingle Style

Fashion changes, and at some point in the late 19th century, the Victorian preference for asymmetrical design and excessive decorative elements on houses began to wane. We can begin to see that transition with Shingle Style, a movement that evolved out of Queen Anne into a look that anticipated the Colonial Revival. Here in Melrose, we can see that evolution in a single block of Porter Street.

Take a look at 246 Porter. As in a Queen Anne house, we see a turret, a wraparound porch, and a prominent center dormer. Yet the feel is quite different.  Here we have an expansive gambrel roof that envelopes the mass of the house in shingles like a great crashing wave. Rising up to meet the roof is a rusticated fieldstone foundation that fences in the porch, leaving just space for wide, basket-handle arches. The textures—fieldstone, clapboard, shingle—are natural and unadorned, suggesting harmony with the natural environment.

Across the street, 223 Porter has eschewed a gambrel roof for a gable, in this case one with a long, off-center slope facing the street like a reverse saltbox; one cannot help but wonder if the architect was deliberately echoing the Upham House, just a few blocks away. The shingles of that roof dominate the façade and support a deep porch resting on an exposed foundation. The turret, rather than feeling like a separate element, seems to flow organically out of the central mass of the house.

Finally, look at 214 Porter. As at 246 Porter, we see a great gambrel roof enveloping the house in shingles, but rather than a turret to add visual interest, we instead see a shallow center cross-gambrel roof covered in weathered shingles of a different shade, decorated simply with a lunette and two diamond-shaped windows. The rest of the windows are in the Colonial Revival six-over-six pane style, and the front door is surrounded by the sidelights and transom popular a century before.

The ad you see here, placed in the Boston Herald in 1916, dubbed 214 Porter “A MODERN HOUSE.” As we shall see in coming installments in this series, in the 20th century, to be “modern” often meant a return to very old principles.