Colonial House Plans
Homes built from Colonial House Plans evoke memories of America’s original east coast settlements. These homes ranged from the New England coastline to the swamps of Georgia. Colonial home plans cover a range of classic styles, such as saltbox, Georgian, Garrison, and Dutch, and they are influenced by English, French, and Dutch architecture.
Colonial floor plans in general, and Southern Colonial House plans in particular, are often symmetrical in nature, including the placement of the front door, and all the windows. Homes built from Colonial style house plans are typically rectangular in shape, and the second floor square footage usually matches that of the lower floor. The exteriors are often composed of brick and/or clapboard.
Colonial house plans combine simple elegance with a touch of history. While different from one east coast region to another, most have multi-pane windows and pillars or columns, and are usually two-story homes.
Common Characteristics of Colonial Home Plans:
- Most universal feature is symmetrical, multi-paned windows
- Typically with symmetrical facades of brick or clapboard, and gable roofs
- Often have a centrally located entry hall, fireplace(s), and simple yet elegant design elements, like dentil molding, shutters, fanlights, and pilasters
- Entrances are often accentuated with columns rising to the second floor
- Pillars and columns are quite common
- Usually two and sometimes three stories, with a rectangular shape
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What follows are excerpts from “American House Styles: A Concise Guide”, written by John Milnes Baker, A.I.A., and published by W. W. Norton in 1994
Colonial (English) 1700-1780
Toward the end of the seventeenth century many changes occurred in the appearance of our colonial
houses. They no longer had an old-world medieval look. Double-hung windows (often called “sash windows”)
had recently been introduced into England from Holland and soon found their way here. They were used
almost exclusively by 1715. The panes were small, about 6 inches by 8 inches with 1-inch-thick muntins.
Older houses were usually retrofitted with the new windows and the colonial house assumed a very different
look from its earlier period.
Roofs became less steep - about 38 degrees instead of 50 degrees or more – and chimneys no longer had the clustered mass of their late-medieval prototypes. They were still large and centrally located in New England until well into the eighteenth century at which time the floor plan acquired a central hallway and chimneys were moved to either side of the house.
The original seventeenth-century rectangular “hall and parlor” layout was usually enlarged with the addition of a lean-to shed at the back creating the familiar saltbox shape. By the turn of the century saltboxes had become so standard that they were built with the long sloping roof as a deliberate element.
The equally familiar Cape Cod cottage evolved (not just on Cape Cod) as a one-story or one-and-a-half story house. Originally these houses were built without dormers. Shingle siding was common, although clapboard siding continued to be used. Incidentally, these houses were rarely painted white before the nineteenth century when the Greek Revival craze swept the country.
What makes these houses Colonial, as opposed to Georgian, is their lack of fancy ornamentation. Embellishments of eaves, window heads, and door surrounds with even vestiges of classical details would make them Georgian or Georgian Colonial.
