House Styles: How to Identify Yours, With Dates for Every Major US and UK Style

A house style is a set of details, such as roof shape, window panes, porch and trim, that was popular during a particular period. If you learn to read a handful of those clues from the sidewalk, you can usually place a house within a few decades. This guide sets out the clues in order, then gives dated tables for 16 US styles and six UK periods, each date tied to a named source.

What are the different types of house styles?

Most house styles are named for an era (Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian) or for the historical look they borrowed (Greek Revival, Tudor Revival, Colonial Revival). Others are named after a movement, such as Prairie or Craftsman, and a few after a shape, such as Cape Cod or ranch. The National Register of Historic Places, the official US list of historic buildings, groups styles into broad periods: Colonial, Early Republic, Mid-19th Century, Late Victorian, Late 19th and 20th Century Revivals, Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Movements, and Modern Movement. Our wider guide to types of architecture covers the same history beyond houses.

What is the difference between a house style and a house type?

The two are easy to mix up:

• Style is the dress: classical columns, pointed Gothic arches, bracketed eaves, half-timbering.
• Type (also called form) is the body: the shape, height and floor plan. Examples are the Cape Cod, the ranch, the split-level, the I-house, the bungalow, the terraced house and the semi-detached pair.

The National Register form treats these as separate questions. It asks for an “architectural classification” from a fixed list of styles, and when no style fits, it allows entries such as “No style” or a form name like “Other: I-house.” The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) noted in its suburbs field guide, archived in 2015, that the National Register’s list of recognized postwar residential styles contained only the ranch.

In practice, one type can wear several styles. Historic England notes that interwar builders put up semi-detached houses in Tudorbethan, neo-Georgian, Art Deco, flat-roofed Modern and neo-vernacular styles. Two houses with the same plan can therefore be different styles, and two houses in the same style can have quite different plans.

How do I figure out what style my house is?

Work from the biggest clue down to the smallest. Stand across the street, take a straight-on photo, and go through these four checks.

1. Start with the roof

The roof is the clue you can read from the farthest away, and it removes half the candidates at once. A mansard roof is the key feature of Second Empire. A very low hipped roof with deep eaves points to Prairie or ranch. A steep roof with dormers on a one-and-a-half-story house suggests a Cape Cod.

“Low” and “steep” are relative. In this guide we call a roof low if it is flatter than about 4 in 12 (a 4 in (10 cm) rise for every 12 in (30 cm) of run, about 18°), and steep if it is 9 in 12 (about 37°) or more. These are our working labels, not official thresholds. You can turn a measured rise and run into degrees with the roof pitch calculator, and our roof pitch angles guide explains the terms.

2. Check symmetry and count the bays

A bay is one vertical line of windows or doors across the front. A centered door with matching windows on each side, often five bays wide, points to Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival or Colonial Revival. Pennsylvania’s field guide says a typical Georgian house is five bays across with a center door. An irregular front with a tower, a projecting gable and a big porch points to Queen Anne.

3. Read the windows

Count the panes in each sash, the sliding half of a double-hung window. Pennsylvania’s field guide lists 6 to 20 panes per sash for Georgian houses and 6-over-6 as the most common Federal pattern, with thinner wood muntins (the bars between panes). Queen Anne houses moved to single-pane sashes, sometimes with small decorative or stained-glass panes. Postwar ranch and split-level houses added the large picture window. Treat window clues with care, because windows are often replaced. Pennsylvania’s guide warns that surviving original windows on its earliest English-style houses are exceedingly rare.

4. Look at the porch and the details

Porches changed with fashion. The main porch signals are:

• Greek Revival: a front porch with columns; grander examples have a full temple front with columns across the whole facade
• Italianate: a one-story porch
• Queen Anne: a large partial or full-width porch with spindlework
• Craftsman bungalow: a large front porch on heavy columns, which Pennsylvania’s guide says may be tapered, square, paired or set on stone or brick piers
• Prairie: massive square porch columns

The smaller details then confirm the reading: dentils (small blocks) under the cornice, brackets under the eaves, half-timbering, bargeboards (carved boards along the gable edge), or exposed rafter tails.

Quick identification key

US house styles: periods and identifying features

The dates below come from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) field guides, which follow the National Register categories, and from the National Park Service. The PHMC ranges describe Pennsylvania, so a style may have arrived earlier or later in your state.

A few notes on the US list

Georgian versus Federal. Both have symmetrical fronts. Look at the front door: a rectangular transom above it suggests Georgian, while an elliptical fanlight with sidelights suggests Federal. Pennsylvania’s guide says the Georgian style arrived in America through British pattern books around 1700. Our Georgian architecture guide covers its English roots.

Cape Cod and the postwar boom. The National Park Service’s suburbs bulletin describes the Cape Cod that prospective renters lined up to inspect at the first Levittown in June 1947. It was one and a half stories, had 750 sq ft (70 m²) of living space on a 6,000 sq ft (557 m²) lot, and had a steep gable roof with two dormers. The bulletin says the Cape Cod provided most of the low-cost suburban housing right after the war, before larger ranch houses took over.

Ranch, split-level and Contemporary. The same bulletin says the ranch, including its split-level variant, stayed the dominant suburban house well into the 1960s. It also notes that the line between ranch and contemporary houses blurred, as both took up glass walls, open planning and a closer link between indoor and outdoor space. “Mid-century modern” is a popular label rather than a National Register category. Many houses sold under that label fit Pennsylvania’s Contemporary style, which comes in flat-roofed and gable-roofed subtypes.

Minimal Traditional. If your small 1940s house looks like a no-frills version of an earlier revival style, with a shallow entry porch, Pennsylvania’s guide calls it Minimal Traditional. It flourished in the 1940s and 1950s and usually had two bedrooms and one bath.

UK house periods: Georgian to postwar

British houses are usually dated by reign or by the two world wars rather than by revival style. The dates differ between sources, so the table shows whose dates are used.

Historic England’s figures show how common the later types are. Builders put up around 3 million semi-detached houses in Britain between the wars. In the decade that began in 1946, local authorities built three-quarters of a total of 2.5 million new houses and flats, and more than 150,000 prefabs went up as well. Historic England says semi-detached houses remained the most common dwelling until the 1960s.

How can I tell how old my house is?

Style gives you a range, not a year. Pennsylvania’s field guide notes that remote regions kept traditional building forms long after cities had moved on to newer designs. Many houses also mix styles or were remodeled, so a Victorian porch on a Georgian house is not unusual. To narrow the date:

• Check the construction. The National Park Service’s Preservation Brief 35 explains that marks on the wood show whether it was worked by ax, adze, pit saw, mill saw (sash or circular) or band saw, and that nails can be hand-wrought, machine-cut or wire. For much of the 19th century, changes in nail manufacture can be dated, which helps establish when a building was built or altered. Attics and basements are the places to look.
• Look for what was added. Holes, scars, patches and nail holes show where trim, porches or partitions used to be.
• Match the house to its neighbors. In a postwar subdivision, the National Park Service notes that builders offered only a few house types, sometimes differing only by number of rooms, roof design or wall material. A whole street often dates to the same few years.
• Confirm with records. The suburbs bulletin advises surveyors to confirm construction dates with local records rather than rely on style guides. In the US, start with your state historic preservation office and any National Register listing. In England, check whether the house is listed.

Why do sources disagree on style names and dates?

Style dates mark when a look was popular, not legal start and end dates, and each heritage body draws the boundaries a little differently. Pennsylvania’s field guide says scholars “sometimes disagree on the categorization and naming of styles.” Historic England dates the Georgian terrace to 1714–1830, while the Georgian Group’s casework covers buildings from 1700 to 1837. Even one source can disagree with itself: Pennsylvania’s categories page dates Tudor Revival to 1890–1940 and Queen Anne to 1880–1900, while its own style pages, used in our table, give 1890–1920 and 1880–1910. Reign-based labels such as Edwardian (Edward VII’s reign, 1901–1910) are also neater than building practice, which did not change overnight with a new monarch. If your house sits on a boundary, treat both labels as reasonable and describe it by its features, such as “a three-bay brick house with a fanlight and 6-over-6 sash.”