That link takes you to a Google Maps page. Click on the photo of house in the information bubble.
That brings you to that whole “walking down the street” Google thing. You’re essentially standing on the street. I’ll need you to turn your camera so it seems as if you are looking to your right, slightly over your right shoulder.
You should see two houses. One is white with maroon shutters and the other is light blue, with what looks like is dark blue shutters.
This style of house is the same as mine, pretty much, with slight modifications. My porch is open. My roof is shaped like a square pyramid (not sure what the proper term for that is).
I believe it is very similar to an American Foursquare home. But these houses have no fireplace and no central dormer. We’re thinking about doing a few renovations and we’d like to stay true to the character of the home. Knowing the exact type of house this is would really help us jump start our renovations.
A little background:
-These houses are found in dense residential areas in Providence and surrounding areas.
-My house was built in 1929, I imagine the others were in the same era.
-There are shades of “craftsman” characteristics, such as built in shelves/columns between two rooms on the first floor.
-There’s (unwanted) vinyl siding, but underneath there appears to be painted shingle siding.
It seems to be pretty much an American Foursquare, but the things the homes lacks appears to DQ it from falling into that category. I read about kit homes from Sears that they would chug down the rails and built, but I can find any exposed architecture that is stamped with serial numbers or anything.
Yah, my house is a 1922 foursquare minus the dormer, and I’ve spent a lot of time on just this subject. Mine doesn’t have a fireplace, either. By 1922-1929 the fireplace was just for show, as coal-fired basement furnaces providing central heating were pretty standard.
For starters, you need this book here. It’s an invaluable resource. There are other books out there with floor plans from the 1920s. Dover Books has a whole slew of them in facsimile reprints. Look under “architecture”.
Note that it isn’t always possible to establish whether your home was in fact an actual Sears Roebuck house, because the basic four-square pattern was extremely popular and was widely offered by many other houses-by-mail dealers like Aladdin Homes, not to mention being built on-site by local carpenters. And the time period spans from about 1915 to about 1930, so that’s a lot of houses.
And even if you think you might have a Sears kit home, it can be really hard to find identifying marks after 90 years of renovations.
BTW, that painted shingle siding may turn out to be asbestos shingle, so be careful before you start ripping things out.
And, a roof shaped like a squared-off pyramid is known as a “hipped” roof.
They all seem to have what I think is called “leaded” windows at the landing of the staircase. It’s kinda stained glass-looking.
The floor plans are pretty similar. The closet on the first floor is right next to the door and its open from the front door to the kitchen. Upstairs straight ahead is a bathroom and then three bedrooms, one at each corner (one is against the space above stairs).
Thanks for all of the advice. It drives me crazy. I’ve been able to find a ton of info on almost every other house style in my area, and see quite a few of these and can’t find anything. I’ve toyed with the idea of just popping out a central dormer and then making necessary alterations and additions to make it an American Foursquare.
Just because it doesn’t have the roof dormer doesn’t make it NOT a foursquare house. It’s still considered an American foursquare.
Note that “usually”. There are lots of houses like yours and mine in Decatur, with the basic foursquare “Prairie Box” style but without the roof dormer. It costs extra to build a roof dormer, and to include a functional third floor requires a stairway up to it, and even a simple attic stairway costs money, so a lot of house builders and developers simply left it off. That doesn’t make the house “not” a foursquare, just a foursquare minus the roof dormer.
In the Houses By Mail book, in the “hipped roof, two or more stories” section, I count six houses that are foursquares minus the roof dormer. There are also several foursquares that have variations in the dormer, such as eyebrow windows, or making the dormer part of the facade. Really, when you get your copy you’ll see that there’s quite a bit of variation in “foursquare”; it’s not carved in stone, “MUST HAVE DORMER”. It’s like with “Colonial”, which can cover a lot of territory.
So if you want to do research on your house, look under “American foursquare”.
My neighborhood has many of these types of foursquares. We’ve also got a few here and there with dormers.
My godmother’s old house – the one next door – is typical of the dormer-less type. Two and a half stories, yes. There is a trap door in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway that leads to the attic.
I kinda thought it was odd that lacking the dormer, when everything else seemed to fit, would change the entire name of the house. Just like Cape Cods and Dormer Capes. I must’ve seen some websites put together by people who didn’t know what they were talking about saying it MUST have the dormer. I will definately get the books you’ve suggested and I really appreciate you helping me clear that up.
And the advice about the shingles. They appeared to be wooden to me and possibly painted over but I will have an expert come out and give me the OK about the shingles not being asbestos.
Yeah, my house has the same deal, the kind you have to push up and slide aside. I’d love to put an office up there or something, but my house has an almost central chimney coming up from the basement, which would mean a staircase would have to be put in a bedroom, rendering a hallway? Not sure if I want to go through the trouble of losing bathroom space either.
Before you make lots of plans about converting your attic into an office, go up there and see if there’s even headroom. My house, too, has that removable access panel, and when you go up there, let’s just say it’s not a useful amount of space that it would occur to you to make into an office. Maybe a teenager would be happy to have a cozy hideaway up there.
IMHO, of course, and YMMV .
We blew in a ton of insulation a number of years ago, and haven’t been up there since.
My sister has an old house with classic cement asbestos siding on it; it got a hole in it where a corner broke off one of the shingles, and she can’t fix it because…it’s asbestos and you can’t fix it, and she can’t replace it because that entails enormous headaches because…it’s asbestos.
The best thing we ever did was put vinyl siding over our original, and I’m sure terribly picturesque, clapboards. Vinyl siding rocks.
Yeah, there’s vinyl over it now, but I’m not a fan of it. I get that it’s easy and looks nice, but something about bringing a little New England charm to it really appeals to us. The vinyl? Not so much.
And sorry about the scavenger hunt with the example! I have Safari too and it was fine, but I realize you sometimes have to jump through hoops with it. I’ll try and find a photo of another example!
It looks just like these homes except with out the dormer. The inside has all of the characteristics, except my doors are two panel and like I mentioned above, have the leaded windows (I’m really not sure if it’s technically called “leaded,” “beveled,” or “stained glass.” A lot of the houses in this neighborhood have them. The front door also appears to be a bit ancient. It has a brass-looking double flapped mail slot and windows set into the wood of the door. Not sure if that’s another 4-Square feature or not.
Oh yeah, and I meant to ask you about the headroom in the attic, especially since it’s “hipped,” there are no high edge walls. So a dormer or 4 would be a must. I suppose there’s always the basement.
You’d probably have to have the stairway to the third floor go up from the hallway, if your front stairway looks like this, which is an uncanny image of my front stairway. Comes out in the hallway upstairs, but there’s no way to extend it up another story, because as you said, the side walls don’t go up a third floor. My FIL lives in a massive four-bedroom-plus-bath-plus-huge-linen-closet foursquare with finished third floor, and their attic stairway opens off a long upstairs hallway, just one simple flight straight up. But then, it was built like that originally in 1918, not retrofitted later.
Remember that your clapboard “New England charm” requires scraping and painting every 10 to 20 years, depending on how good a job you did last time.
Interesting article here, on one local controversy between vinyl and “New England charm”. Notice the part where it says that they just had it done “eight years ago”.
but I will have an expert come out and give me the OK about the shingles not being asbestos.
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