What is a bungalow? From Bengal to Pasadena and Chicago: the one-storey house with a porch, the Craftsman, California and Chicago bungalows, and what the word means in Britain, India and Australia

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A bungalow is a house of one storey, or one and a half with rooms in the roof, low and wide, with a porch or veranda under a broad roof and the living rooms and bedrooms on one floor; the word comes from the Bengali bangla, "of Bengal", the thatched hut of the Bengal countryside that the British East India Company's officers adapted in the 1700s into a one-storey house with a veranda all round for the heat, and it came to England as a seaside cottage in 1870, to America as the California bungalow of about 1900, a small house with a low roof, a deep porch and an open plan for a family without servants, and to Australia at the same time. In the United States between 1905 and 1930 the bungalow, mostly in the Craftsman style, was the most common new house in the country, built by the hundred thousand from plan books and kits in every city, with a brick version of 80,000 houses in Chicago; the ranch of the 1950s is its child and the word has meant, since, any small one-storey house. Below: the word and India, England, the American bungalow and its kinds, the features, the differences from the houses it is confused with, why it mattered, where to see them, and the myths, with the Craftsman style in what is a Craftsman house and the rest in American house styles.

The word: Bengal and the British veranda

In the villages of Bengal the bangla was a hut of mud walls under a thatched roof curved like an upturned boat, whose eaves came down low all round to shade the walls and make a veranda; the British who governed Bengal from 1757 borrowed the form for their own houses in the country stations, "bungalows", one storey of brick and plaster on a raised plinth, with a high hipped roof of thatch or tile, a veranda on every side under it, rooms opening onto one another for the air, and the kitchen and servants in outbuildings, and by 1800 the bungalow was the standard house of the Raj from the dak bungalows for travellers to the residences of collectors, and the word was in English; the "dak bungalow" of the post road and the "hill bungalow" of Simla and Ootacamund, with a gable and a fireplace, are its types. Kipling's houses are bungalows, and India has kept the word for a detached house of any size, so that a bungalow in Delhi or Mumbai is a mansion. Bungalow.

England: the seaside bungalow

The first English bungalows were built in 1869–70 at Westgate-on-Sea and Birchington in Kent by the builder John Taylor as holiday houses, one storey, of brick with a veranda, for the professional classes who could not afford a villa, and the painter Rossetti died in one in 1882; the word meant a simple, informal, healthy house by the sea or in the country, and in the 1890s and 1900s the Arts and Crafts architects, Voysey and Baillie Scott, built bungalows for the artistic middle class with the low roof and the big living room. Between the wars the bungalow became the cheap house of England's coasts and suburbs, on the plotlands and the ribbon developments of the 1930s, "bungaloid growth" in the words of its enemies, and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 was in part a reaction to it; the bungalow in Britain now means a retirement house with no stairs, a fifth of the housing stock in some seaside towns, and the word has none of its American glamour.

The American bungalow, 1900–1930

• California. The bungalow arrived in California in the 1890s as the house for the climate and the newcomer, one storey with a porch, and about 1905 met the Craftsman style: the California bungalow, of one or one and a half storeys with a low-pitched gable roof of wide eaves and exposed rafters, a porch under its own gable on tapered columns and stone or brick piers, shingles or clapboard, and inside a living room with a fireplace open to the dining room, two or three bedrooms, a kitchen with a breakfast nook and one bath, on a 50-foot lot with a garden; the Greene brothers built the "ultimate bungalows" in Pasadena, and Los Angeles built 100,000 ordinary ones.
• The Craftsman bungalow. The same house across the country from 1908 to 1930, in Seattle, Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, Memphis, Atlanta and the suburbs of the East, sold by Gustav Stickley's magazine, by the plan books of Henry Wilson and Jud Yoho, and by the kit companies, Sears, Aladdin and Montgomery Ward, which shipped 100,000 bungalows by rail; the porch, the built-ins and the wood are in what is a Craftsman house.
• The Chicago bungalow. A local type of 1910–40: one and a half storeys of brick, often with limestone trim, a low hipped roof with a dormer, a front bay of art-glass windows, an enclosed porch or none, the entrance at the side, a full basement, and a long narrow plan for the city's 25-foot lots, with the living room across the front, the bedrooms down one side and the kitchen at the back; 80,000 of them in a belt around the city, the largest concentration of bungalows in the world, and Milwaukee, Detroit and Cleveland have their own.
• Other kinds. The Spanish or Mission bungalow of stucco and red tile in California and Florida; the airplane bungalow with a small second storey on the roof like a cockpit, of Los Angeles and Seattle; the Prairie bungalow with a hipped roof in the Midwest; the shingled bungalows of the Northeast; the raised bungalow of New Orleans and Florida on piers; and the bungalow court, a dozen small bungalows around a shared garden, invented in Pasadena in 1909 for winter visitors and the ancestor of the garden apartment.

How to recognise a bungalow

• One storey, or one and a half with dormers, the roof being a large part of the house; two full storeys is not a bungalow.
• A low roof, gabled or hipped, with wide overhanging eaves, and, on the Craftsman kind, exposed rafters and brackets.
• A porch, usually across the front under the main roof or its own, with heavy columns and piers; the porch is the bungalow's veranda and its point.
• A wide front, the house set broadside to the street and low to the ground, with the door in the middle or at one side.
• An open plan, the living and dining rooms flowing together, the bedrooms off a short hall, one bath, and built-ins; no formal parlor, no servants' rooms, no stair hall.
• Natural materials, shingles, clapboard, brick, stucco, stone, in earth colours, with the structure showing.

Bungalow, cottage, Cape, ranch, Craftsman

• Cottage. Any small house; a bungalow is a small house of one storey with a porch, and in Britain "bungalow" and "cottage" are different, the cottage being old and two-storeyed.
• Cape Cod. One and a half storeys with a steep roof, a central chimney and no porch; the bungalow has a low roof and a porch. Both are small; the Cape is New England's and the bungalow California's.
• Ranch. The bungalow's child of 1945–70: one storey, low roof, wide front, open plan, but longer, lower, without the porch, with a garage and picture windows and a lot twice as wide; the ranch is a bungalow that lost its porch and grew a car.
• Craftsman. The style most American bungalows wear; a bungalow is the shape. Craftsman bungalow is the overlap.
• Villa. In Australia, the bungalow's predecessor of the 1880s, with a corrugated-iron roof and a veranda; the California bungalow arrived in Sydney and Melbourne in 1915 and became the house of the suburbs to 1940, in brick with a tiled roof.
• Bungalow in India. A detached house with a compound, of any size; the Lutyens bungalows of New Delhi are the most valuable houses in India.

Why the bungalow mattered

The bungalow was the first house designed for the family that had no servants and wanted no parlor: one floor, so that the housewife did not climb stairs; a living room instead of a parlor and a sitting room, with the fireplace in it; a kitchen that was a room she used, with cabinets built in, a breakfast nook and a sink under a window; a bathroom with plumbing; a porch as a room for the summer; and the whole cheap enough, from 1,500 to 4,000 dollars, for a clerk or a carpenter to own, on a lot with a garden and a garage, at the end of the streetcar line. The magazines that sold it, "The Craftsman", "House Beautiful", "Ladies' Home Journal" and "Bungalow Magazine", sold a way of life, of simplicity, health and the outdoors, against the Victorian house of dark rooms and hired girls, and the bungalow made the American suburb of the 1920s, the first in which most families owned their house; the ranch and the split-level took its plan and lost its porch, and every open-plan house since is its descendant. It also ended the Victorian city's density: the bungalow on its own lot is the reason American cities spread as they do.

Where to see them

• Pasadena, California. The Gamble House (1908), the Greenes' ultimate bungalow, open; Bungalow Heaven, 800 bungalows of 1900–30, with a tour each April; the bungalow courts of the Pasadena Playhouse district.
• Los Angeles. Highland Park, Hollywood, West Adams and the courts of Venice; Sierra Madre and South Pasadena.
• Chicago. The bungalow belt of the Southwest and Northwest sides, Berwyn's 3,000, and the Chicago Bungalow Association's tours.
• Seattle and Portland. The bungalow streets of Wallingford, Ballard and Irvington; Vancouver's Kitsilano.
• Australia. Haberfield and Rosebery in Sydney, the Californian bungalows of Camberwell and Malvern in Melbourne.
• England. Birchington's Taylor bungalows of 1870, Rossetti's among them; the plotland bungalows of Peacehaven and Jaywick.
• India. The Lutyens Bungalow Zone of New Delhi; the dak bungalows on the old post roads; the hill stations.

Versions and theories

• A bungalow is a small house. A small house of one storey with a porch, in America and Britain; a house of any size in India; a "bungalow" of two storeys in Britain is called a chalet bungalow and in America is not a bungalow.
• Bungalow and Craftsman are the same. Shape and style; most American bungalows are Craftsman and most Craftsman houses are bungalows, and the others are Spanish, Colonial, Prairie or Tudor bungalows.
• The bungalow is American. Indian, then British, then American, then Australian; the American one is the famous one.
• Bungalows were for the poor. For the middle class that could not afford a servant, and for the retired, the newcomer and the winter visitor; the Gamble House cost 50,000 dollars in 1908 and is a bungalow.
• The bungalow died with the Depression. The Craftsman bungalow did; the one-storey house came back as the ranch, and Britain's bungalows were mostly built after 1945.
• The bungalow court is the first motel. The motel of 1925 copied the court's cabins around a yard; the court came first, in Pasadena in 1909, for people who stayed the winter.

Open the sections: buildings by style, ancient temples of the world, all articles.