Queen
Anne By Peter Barr In 1876, at the British Pavilion of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, American designers discovered the work of an English architect named Richard Norman Shaw. Shaw had been specializing at the time in a style of half-timbered architecture that was presumed to have originated during the early 18th-century reign of Queen Anne. Later historians recognized that the style derived instead from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras—almost one hundred years earlier. But by then it was too late; in the late 1870s, American architectural magazines, including The American Architect and Building News, had already popularized America’s “modern” style under the name “Queen Anne.” Why did Shaw’s half-timbered buildings appeal to American architects? They quickly recognized the adaptability of his structures, which allowed for endless variation of asymmetrical floor plans, complex roof designs and a wide variety of applied decoration. The availability of inexpensive factory-made nails after mid-century made complex architectural forms practical. Architects were free for the first time in history to arrange rooms of varying sizes without consideration of how the rooms would fit within timber frames. Boxy houses, like those built in the first half of the nineteenth century, seemed outmoded. On the exterior of Queen Anne homes, the only rule seemed to be that the home owners should contribute to the attractiveness of their communities by building the largest possible house with as many irregular surfaces as possible. They did this by adding projecting towers and bays and by recessing areas of walls to make room for verandahs and niches. This assortment of variously contrasting surfaces would allow the owner to apply to the exterior of the home the maximum amount of variously contrasting materials. Space could easily be found somewhere on these structures for exciting new decorative elements that in a previous era would have seemed exceedingly labor intensive, technically impractical or otherwise costly. These included scroll-cut verge boards (first introduced in designs for Gothic Revival homes), lathe-turned spindle work (which made possible rows and rows of neatly carved, identical sticks for the era’s pervasive wrap-around porches), and wooden shingles (trimmed at the factory to allow designers to create a wide variety of patterns—the most popular resembling the scales of a fish). Windows became an important component in Queen Anne design, too, as large panes of factory-made clear glass made possible huge picture windows, which were often bordered by smaller panes of leaded, etched or stained glass. These decorative elements could be shipped across the country (sometimes around the world) from specialized factories and added by local builders to a wide variety of local building materials, including wood, stucco, glazed and unglazed tile, slate, brick and stone. This was an eclectic era, sometimes referred to as the Victorian age, in which individuality was measured by one’s ability to assemble large quantities of diverse things—both hand crafted and mass produced—in an original way. Consistency, historical accuracy and restraint were considered to be unnecessary and even lacking in civic-mindedness. In the interiors of their homes, the very-well-to-do (usually merchants or owners of factories) could flaunt their education and cosmopolitan good taste by amassing their collections of books, musical instruments and European souvenirs, which they juxtaposed increasingly as the century came to a close with Japanese ceramics, woodcuts and lacquer-ware. These were typically displayed en mass in their wood-paneled or wallpapered parlors—rooms that were used almost exclusively for receiving guests near the homes’ richly carved front doors and staircases. (The maid’s staircase in the back of the house was often plain and steep.) Their homes also expressed the owner’s modernity by containing all the latest conveniences that they could afford including, by the end of the century, running water and electricity. In Adrian, the Queen Anne style is closely associated with the architect and builder Christian Frederick "Fred" Matthes (1854-1910), who designed homes for many of Lenawee County's wealthiest families in the 1880s and 1890s--making sure that the exterior details of each home varied from all the others. Interiors of his buildings, too, were often finished with the finest materials and craftsmanship. Matthes's Thompson House in Hudson is a choice example of one of his finer homes; it is now a house museum and open to the public. At the peak of the Queen Anne style's popularity, Matthes proudly offered his services in the 1895 Adrian city directory, taking out a full-page advertisement that featured a photograph of the Presbyterian Manse at 435 Dennis Street. Of course modern families of more modest means could build Queen Anne houses, too. But their homes were less likely to involve the services of an architect. Based most often on mail-order plans, their homes tended to be boxier and simply had less of all the above. Still, even modest homes could contribute to the beauty of their community by featuring complex roofs that usually combined hips and gables (this combination roof alone qualifies a home as Queen Anne—a quality that is enjoying a revived popularity today). And the gables of even the most modest Queen Anne home would almost certainly be decorated with applied half timbers or factory-made fish-scale shingles. Additional resources would allow them to add such features as verge boards, wrap-around spindle-work porches and an interesting window or two. The Queen Anne style would continue to be popular until the First World War (1914-1919, when more than 8.5 million soldiers lost their lives), which was an even more sobering event for this ostentatious culture than the economic depression of 1893. (Interestingly, Adrian seems to have weathered the economic termoil of the 1893 depression unscathed, thanks to the city's prospering wire fence industry.) Moreover, as professional architects increasingly received academic training during this era, the tide turned against Queen-Anne eclecticism and toward historical authenticity, consistency and restraint associated with the Colonial Revival, Foursquare and Craftsman styles.
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