What layout for a Folk Victorian?
There are lots of modest Folk Victorian houses in Texas like those below (also sometimes called Queen Anne cottages, or gable-front-and-wing) and when they are for sale, you can get a peek inside. But I can never figure out what the interior layout looks like (both originally and/or modernized, as powder and laundry rooms have been added, etc.). You can find vintage house plans everywhere online from old plan books, but they never have these houses! The vintage plan books seem to have been intended for suburban lots and are frequently deeper than they are wide. These Folk houses usually look wider, and a bit ramshackle as pieces were added on, but I can't find even a single sketch of an interior plan, even widening my search to other regions of the country! I can't believe that in the era of the internet, if I want to see a floor plan for one of these historic houses I might have to simply visit some myself and measure and sketch them. It makes me want to write a book about it. I did look at a ton of books like The Field Guide to American Houses and Early Texas Houses etc., but these don't show interiors. And from looking at houses for sale, I can tell there have been many ways these folk houses laid out mudrooms and other necessities. A website called Farmhouse Vernacular sketched a bubble diagram without measurements, but that is about what I have found.
I'm so curious if any of you have seen a book like this, or a website, or if you own one yourself and could give me a sketch. Thanks!
Comments (16)
Emily L
2 years ago
maddielee
2 years agoRelated Discussions
Is this Folk Victorian?
Comments (6)How does one define Folk Victorian? It's not a recognized historical style in acedemia, so with no fixed definition, it could apply to any structure built from 1837 to 1901 that was not architect-designed. When I write a description of a vernacular house, I see if it falls into one of the traditional vernacular shapes, like single-room cabin, double pen, hall & parlor, dogtrot, pyramidal, center-hall, two-story center hall (I-house) , cruciform, Tri-gable Ell, tri-gable Tee. Ding -ding-ding! Yours looks like a Tri-gable Tee (from this angle anyhow). So that's where you begin analyzing. I would want to study everything up close, determine which details are original, (one porch is not like the other) Has it been modified over time. My question back would be what does it look like from other angles, and does the front door wall line up in plane with the bedroom(?) wall above. From this angle they look different, not stacked up. Then, if this is true, and is not a later modification, this means that it's likely that the plan was drawn out with larger downstairs rooms than upstairs, which puts it over the line into a structure built outside the oral tradition. But it seems more likely it has been modified; Then we have a more difficult job to carefully winnow out the modifications and additions to come up with what the original form would have been. And then it's an educated guess at best, unless a lot of demo or a complete gutting is under way. With what is before me, I'd say it is a turn of the 20th century, 2-story tri-gable Tee, wood-frame, clapboard vernacular farmhouse, with the stem of the tee towards the road, and corner entry porches. Casey...See MoreFloor Refinishing Folk Victorian
Comments (2)If narrow probably floorboards are original. If light, I would guess maple. I would NOT stain vintage floors as the aged wood will have developed a beautiful rich amber glow not possible to duplicate with colored stains - just waterlox or some sort of clear finish is all you need. Sounds like you may not have had a lot of wood finishing experience? You may want to get some quotes if you are thinking of sanding - but be careful of the type of pro who wants to take off too much and try to make it look new. With vintage floors you need to be very conservative about not taking off too much - there's only so many sandings a floor can take. That's why the above poster's advice is agood, about trying cleaning and buffing first before thinking about sanding....See MoreHow would you reconfigure the layout of these rooms? 1907 Victorian
Comments (23)I agree with moving in and considering for a time, but here is something to consider while you're doing that: What drove this idea is the first room you enter into from the front door doesn't seem suited to anything but being a dining room. As a living room, it's odd that it's so small compared to the other living spaces, and, as you already said, there's no good wall for the TV. You also wouldn't want that room to be a kitchen for many, many reasons. However, that room would be a perfectly functional, reasonably-sized, not-weird-seeming dining room. If that room is a dining room, that also means the nook under the stairs would be a very logical area for a buffet. If that first room when you enter is the dining room, then the next room on your way into the house should be the kitchen because you want your kitchen and dining room handy to each other. As it happens, the current-dining-room-suggested-kitchen space is large enough and offset enough from the current-living-room-suggested-dining-room that it would be possible to funnel all traffic past the kitchen rather than through it. So your work zones in the kitchen won't be inundated with unwanted visitors. Furthermore, this suggested location for the kitchen is still handy to the back deck for outdoor eating. If those first two rooms become the dining and kitchen, then that leaves the current kitchen space to become the living room. It's a little unorthodox to have the living room as the room farthest from the front door, but it actually makes a lot of sense for this house. The other two rooms really do lend themselves to being the dining room and kitchen, and the current kitchen space is a good size for a living room and has two walls that could be the TV wall. It's also handier to the back deck/yard than the current living room, which I think will actually be a real upgrade. With the exception of shortening the two dining room windows (which isn't a structural change) so they're above counter height, none of the above requires any changes to any of the walls at all. That's nice because I think you'd get the most out of your space if you do bite the bullet and move some walls in the left half of the floor plan. The way it's currently laid out really, REALLY isn't as good as it could be. Since you don't have a guest bedroom downstairs, you don't need a full bath downstairs. You just need a half bath, and the shower space could be allotted to something else that would be more useful. Furthermore, you also don't really need deck access from the left side of the house, and having that deck access means unnecessarily losing a lot of space to a long hallway. On top of that, you have such an odd, circuitous entrance to the master bedroom that is (a) weird, and (b) means unnecessarily losing even more space to walkways. And lastly, there's a couple chopped up, not-optimally-shaped closets. Moving walls around quite freely in that general area, I was able to fit in a large master bath, a large master walk-in closet, a dedicated laundry room (that is accessible off a hallway, placed where the dryer can vent directly outside, is handy to your room, and yet is still far enough from the room that you won't be hearing the machines while you're trying to sleep), and a bonus hallway closet. Note that I shifted the doorway to the hallway from the current-dining-room-suggested-kitchen slightly so that you couldn't really see either the half bath or the master bedroom from the living areas....See MoreVictorian Folk or Victorian Farm House? Difference?
Comments (18)I recently went through this with my own house (built in 1892 in a large city), and it looks very similar to yours. And given my related education, I went down quite the research hole! First, the years given for eras of architecture, art, and design histories are the popular years — so it is possible for a person to build a Victorian house after it fell out of popularity, especially considering these particular architecture eras (Victorian, Edwardian, etc.) are based on the years of queens and kings (i.e., Queen Victoria‘s reign was 1837 to 1901). But I think there is definitely something to you finding the earlier record and the information about the fire. In my city, they started classification at the year 1900, so homeowners with the year 1900 have to take additional steps to dig deeper for the exact year — I got lucky and found my house with the label “being built” on an 1892 map. Secondly, the use of “folk” and “farm” are generalized terms. The style of your house is Victorian Carpenter Gothic — this is a specific type of the Gothic revival period that took place during the Victorian era. If it would’ve been built in a rural/farming area, then it would more so be referred to as folk or farm, or even Rural Gothic. The Carpenter Gothic house style was extremely popular throughout the US, as the invention of the scroll saw allowed basic carpenters to easily create ornate trim from wood or purchase it from mass-produced options. A general google search for Carpenter Gothic house will yield a ton of results from extremely ornate houses to simpler versions (like your house). I spent so much time looking at examples online to brainstorm the exterior rehab I’m doing, I finally checked out a book from my library called “Storybook Cottages: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style” by Gladys Montgomery, and it’s a great resource of photos and history — I highly recommend it! You can also buy it used on Amazon. And if you want to try and find your house on a map, one of the best sources are Sanborn maps; that’s where I found my house mapped. You can view a lot of these maps on the Library of Congress’s website, and then filter the results for your state, city, year, etc. The Sanborn Map Compamny was based out of New York, but they created maps all over the country specifically for fire insurance companies to use in assessing liability in urban areas — so the maps also include details concerning building materials, number of floors, etc....See MoreEmily L
2 years agoEmily L
2 years ago
PROMark Bischak, Architect
2 years agoThey wanted this house
with this budget
So it all works out.
Bottom line is find a local architect that can design a house that meets your needs, fits the site, and has the style you like. If you want a house that is historically correct, find a local architect that has experience in the historical architectural style you desire.
Emily L thanked Mark Bischak, ArchitectEmily L
2 years agoEmily L
2 years agolast modified: 2 years ago>Bottom line is find a local architect that can design a house that meets your needs, fits the site, and has the style you like. If you want a house that is historically correct, find a local architect that has experience in the historical architectural style you desire.
Fair enough, I might as well add some details. This is 30+ acres in rural East Texas. There was a 1930s farmhouse on a large flat area near the road that was demolished at some point. Across the street there is still a 1930s folk farmhouse, which is VERY rare for this area (it has double front gables, symmetrical, and being vaguely remodeled). The market in this area is 95% manufactured homes, and probably 4% other prefab cabin/portable metal bldgs, and then the last 1% are custom homes that I would bet are entirely by design-build firms, in the style of what I might call "styleless European" (most) or when done well (rare) I might call it the "Lone Star Ranch" variety, like below.
Southern Living Showcase Home Project · More Info
Bless their hearts, it's a lovely house, I've nothing against it.But we want to build a small vacation house, just a cabin or cottage perhaps 900-1200 sq ft, and it occurred to me that back in the 1930s, this was probably the size these houses would have been. I love old houses and I dislike modern open floor plans, so I thought we might consider a modest "new old house" that blended in and looked as if it might have been a remodeled original old house. (Assuming I actually liked what they were like inside, which as I said, I don't know and am trying to find out. I probably just have to find some in real life.) My feeling, which may be wrong, is that many aspects of the "new old house" can be more expensive if you are going for a true replica, but certain things like room and door placement, ceiling and baseboard heights, etc can be done with an eye toward giving an older feel even if you aren't using hand-carved newel posts.
But this is not Connecticut or Vermont. There is not a large market for historic houses here, or indeed for a hundred miles in any direction. I thought (and still think, but am open minded) that my best bet would be to familiarize myself with typical layouts, ceiling heights, stair and door design etc and then know what to tell a design build firm that actually will build in this area.. If you know of architects that work remotely, work on small <1200 sq ft houses, and have knowledge of folk victorian styles like below, I would love to hear about them!!
Victorian Gingerbread House · More Info
pricklypearcactus
2 years agoHere is an archive of Sears house plans.
http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/byimage.htm
This on seems similar to ones you're looking at, though it does have a second level. If the homes weren't kits like this, I think you'll just have to tour any that are up for sale in order to see actual floor plans.
Emily L thanked pricklypearcactuslaura_04
2 years agoA floorplan I found. I would hire an architect to create a plan with a center staircase for a 1.5 story, bedrooms upstairs & master on main level
Emily L thanked laura_04laura_04
2 years agoEmily L
2 years ago
Holly Stockley