History Of The Craftsman House

What The Craftsman Style Actually Was, Before It Got Repackaged

The Craftsman house is a residential building tradition that ran from about 1905 to 1930, peaking between 1910 and 1925. It came out of the American Arts and Crafts movement, which was basically a reaction against the ornate Victorian excess that had saturated housing construction for the previous fifty years. The movement wanted honest materials, visible joinery, and a kind of modest dignity in working-class homes. Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine pushed the aesthetic hard, and companies like Craftsman Homes by the L. Frank Company sold kit houses based on those principles across the country. Key defining features include low-pitched gable roofs, wide unenclosed eaves with exposed rafters or decorative brackets, tapered square columns on stone or brick piers, front porches that are integral to the house massing, and heavy use of natural materials—wood shingles, stone foundations, brick accents. Internally, built-in cabinetry, wainscoting, and a generally open flow from the living room to the dining area became standard. Bungalows are the most recognizable subset, though not all Craftsman homes are bungalows and not all bungalows are Craftsman.

History Of The Craftsman House: What To Look For In An Original

If you're evaluating a house for authenticity, here is what matters. Check the roof pitch first. True Craftsman roofs sit between 4 and 6 on 12. Anything steeper is usually a later addition or a misselling. Look at the porch columns. Original ones taper noticeably from bottom to top and rest on substantial masonry piers, not thin wooden posts bolted to a deck. The windows are another tell. Double-hung sash with multiple panes in the upper sash—often six-over-one or eight-over-one configurations—and substantial wood frames, not hollow vinyl replacements. Kitchens in original Craftsmans are surprisingly small and functional, not the open-concept spaces people assume they had. I was restoring a 1912 Craftsman bungalow in Oakland a few years back and spent three weeks arguing with a contractor who wanted to tear out the original built-in desk and china cabinet in the dining room because "it wasn't open concept." We ended up saving it by proving through county records and period photography that the built-in was factory-original, not an aftermarket addition. The real head-scratcher was the fireplace surround. Someone in the seventies had covered the original tile with drywall and painted it beige. Finding the tile required carefully probing around the edges with a spade bit until I hit the distinctive geometric pattern typical of Gladding McBean tile work from that era. Once I confirmed the tile was original, we used a chemical stripper rather than power tools, which would have shattered eighty-year-old ceramic in seconds. Took about twelve hours total to expose and stabilize it. Here is something most people get wrong about Craftsman interiors: the light fixtures. Original homes did not use flush-mount ceiling fixtures in the way modern codes encourage. They used pendant lights, often with slag glass or art glass shades, suspended at specific heights over dining tables and kitchen work areas. When you find original wiring, it is usually knotty pine raceway or early cloth-covered romex running along baseboards, not inside walls. Retrofitting modern electrical into these houses without destroying the character is one of the more frustrating parts of renovation. You can run new conduits through basement joists and chase narrow slots into plaster, but it adds significant cost compared to a new build. Budget an extra three to five thousand dollars per floor for careful electrical reproduction work.

Why So Many "Craftsman" Houses Are Not Actually Craftsman

The term got slapped on everything from the fifties through the ninies as a marketing label. Tract builders in the postwar era copied the aesthetic superficially—low rooflines, a porch, some shingle texture—but skipped the structural honesty. Exposed rafters became fake decorative brackets nailed to a flat facade. Tapered columns turned into mass-produced decorative posts from home centers. The result is what appraisers now call "Craftsman-Style" rather than genuine Craftsman, and the distinction matters when you are pulling permits or getting a historical designation. A lot of houses listed as Craftsman on Zillow turn out to be 1960s ranches that received a facade treatment. The floor plans give it away immediately. Original Craftsmans have defined rooms, not the flowing open spaces people mistakenly think are period-correct. Another issue is the window replacements. Most original Craftsman windows were single-pane double-hung sash. Homeowners replace them with vinyl dual-pane units that look nothing like the originals—wrong muntin patterns, wrong sight lines, wrong operation. You can buy authentic reproduction wood windows now from companies like Ken Rylands or Accutrade, but they run roughly three to four times the cost of a standard vinyl replacement. A full house window job on a typical four-bedroom bungalow can easily hit eighteen to twenty-five thousand dollars if you want it done right. Some people compromise by keeping the exterior profile and adding interior storm panels, which gets you closer to the look without the full replacement cost, though you sacrifice some energy efficiency. The landscaping around original Craftsmans also followed a specific logic. Low hedges, native plantings, gravel or flagstone walkways, and a strong connection between the front porch and the street. Modern developments tend to put ornamental flower beds two feet from the foundation with high-maintenance shrubs that clash with the horizontal lines of the house. That is not a restoration problem but it does affect how the house reads to anyone familiar with the style. It is surprising how many people who restore the house itself leave the landscaping looking like a generic subdivision.

Practical Steps If You Own Or Are Buying A Craftsman

Start with documentation. Pull your county parcel records and any historical society archives for the address. Many cities with significant Craftsman neighborhoods—Portland, Seattle, Pasadena, Chicago, Los Angeles—have district surveys that list original builders, architects, and model numbers if it was a kit house. The American System-Built Homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, have extensive records still accessible through the Taliesin Archive. Knowing whether your house came from a kit catalog or was custom-designed changes what you can reasonably restore and what elements were probably altered by previous owners. Do not paint the exterior trim unless you have a good reason. Many original Craftsman homes had stained wood—cedar shingles, pine trim—rather than painted surfaces. Paint was more common on the inland and eastern versions where weather demanded it. If you strip paint, you are committing to a maintenance cycle every five to seven years going forward, and you risk damaging the wood underneath if you use a heat gun or chemical stripper carelessly. A test strip in an inconspicuous area tells you what you are dealing with before you commit to a whole facade. If you are dealing with plaster walls, which most original Craftsmans have, learn how to patch them properly. Modern drywall repair looks wrong on these houses at scale. Lime plaster can be mixed and matched to the existing wall if you can identify the aggregate. Sand and shelllime was common in the Bay Area, while cement-based plasters show up in drier climates. The color difference between old plaster and new patch is real and it shows. Mixing a wash of diluted casein paint over the repaired section helps blend it, but it does not eliminate the difference entirely. You can live with that or commit to limewashing the entire room, which most people do not realize they are signing up for when they decide to fix a nail hole.

Kitchens are where Craftsman renovations go most often off the rails. The original layout was compact and efficient, with a butler's pantry separating the kitchen from the dining room in larger homes. People tear down that pantry to create an open concept and lose the architectural logic of the house. If you keep the butler's pantry, you gain storage, a serving area, and a clear circulation path that the original designer intended. It also makes the kitchen feel larger because you are working within the actual spatial hierarchy rather than trying to force a modern flow into a space that was never designed for it.

What This Style Cannot Do For You

Being an original Craftsman does not automatically make a house energy-efficient, structurally sound, or to maintain. Single-pane windows alone will set your heating and cooling costs well above modern standards. The aluminum wiring found in some 1950s-era electrical updates in Craftsmans is a known fire hazard and requires specialist remediation. Knob-and-tube wiring persists in many originals and is not a code violation in most jurisdictions as long as it is intact, but insurance companies will treat it differently, and some lenders will refuse to finance a home with unreplaced knob-and-tube in the walls. Historical designation can be a double-edged sword. Local landmark status may protect the exterior from alteration, which is good if you want to preserve the style, but it also means you cannot get a variance to add a second story or reconfigure the floor plan without going through a review board. That process adds six to twelve months and several thousand dollars in legal and consultant fees to any project. I had a client in San Francisco who wanted to add a master suite above the garage on his 1914 Craftsman. The design was straightforward, but the historical commission rejected it twice because the new volume read as too dominant from the street. He ended up converting the existing garage footprint instead, which cost about thirty percent less and took half the permitting time. There is also the matter of materials availability. Original replacement parts for specific Craftsman details—brass door hardware, leaded glass, specific tile patterns, shingle profiles—are not off-the-shelf items. You are often sourcing from salvage yards, specialty manufacturers, or reproductions that may not match the exact profile. A salvaged Craftsman mantel from a deconstructed 1920s hotel in Chicago can run four to eight thousand dollars depending on condition and complexity. A reproduction from a millwork company might cost two to three thousand but will not have the same material density or joinery quality as the original.

Kit houses are a specific subcategory worth addressing separately. Companies like Sears, Aladdin, and Craftsman Homes by L. Frank sold houses by mail order with components shipped in crates. The trade-off was affordability and speed of construction, but the material quality was sometimes lower than custom-built equivalents. Two-by-four framing instead of two-by-six, thinner siding, smaller windows. These houses are still structurally sound after a century, but they may lack the thermal mass and dimensional generosity of a custom Craftsman. If you are buying a kit house, checking the original blueprint drawings through the manufacturer archives can tell you what you are working with and whether previous owners have already compensated for the thinner walls with insulation or window upgrades.