What is a Cape Cod house? The 1690 original, the steep roof and central chimney, the half, three-quarter and full Cape, the Royal Barry Wills revival and the Levittown Cape

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A Cape Cod house is a small, one-and-a-half-storey house of rectangular plan, with a steep gable roof of about 45 degrees whose eaves come down just above the first-floor windows, a large chimney in the centre carrying the fireplaces of every room, a symmetrical front with the door in the middle and windows either side, walls of wood shingles or clapboard, little ornament and no porch; the type was built by the English settlers of Cape Cod and coastal New England from about 1690, low and tight to stand the Atlantic wind and heated by the one chimney, and was revived in the 1930s by the Boston architect Royal Barry Wills as the ideal small house, then built by the million as the cheapest house the Federal Housing Administration would insure and the house of Levittown, so that the Cape, with dormers and a garage, is the most common house in the United States. Below: the original and how it was built, the sizes, the revival, the suburban Cape, the features, the differences from the Colonial, the saltbox and the ranch, where to see them, and the myths, with the other styles in American house styles and the oldest survivors in the oldest buildings in America.

The original, 1690–1850

The English who settled Cape Cod and the Massachusetts coast in the 1600s built the timber-framed hall-and-parlor houses of East Anglia, with a central chimney, and by about 1690 had reduced them to the form the Cape's weather demanded: a low house, one storey and a loft, on a shallow foundation or none, with a steep roof to shed snow and rain, the eaves brought down low so that the wind had little wall to push against, a chimney of brick in the middle whose mass held the heat of the fires in the hall, the parlor and the kitchen behind, small windows with many small panes, a door in the centre opening on a tiny stair hall against the chimney, shingles of cedar on the walls and roof that were never painted and went silver-grey in the salt air, and shutters against the storms; some were built on timber sills so they could be dragged to a new site by oxen, and many were. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, named the type on a tour of 1800: "the houses in Yarmouth are called Cape Cod houses". About 500 of the original Capes survive on the Cape and the islands, and the type spread along the coast from Maine to Long Island and inland to New York and Ohio with the Yankee emigrants. Cape Cod house.

Half, three-quarter and full Cape

• The half Cape. A door at one end of the front and two windows beside it, one room deep with a loft, the starter house of a young couple, built to be extended along the front as the family grew and the money came; the "house and a half".
• The three-quarter Cape. The door with two windows on one side and one on the other, the half Cape extended, and the most common of the old ones.
• The full Cape, or double Cape. The door in the centre with two windows either side, five bays, two rooms either side of the chimney and a kitchen across the back under a lean-to roof, the finished form and the one the revival copied.
• The bow roof Cape. A variant of the 1700s with a roof curved like a ship's hull, built by ship carpenters, on Cape Cod and the South Shore.
• The Cape with an ell. A wing at the back or side for the kitchen and the woodshed, connecting to the barn in the "big house, little house, back house, barn" of northern New England.

The revival: Royal Barry Wills and the 1930s

The Colonial Revival of the 1880s had rebuilt the Georgian mansions of the rich; the Cape came back in the Depression as the small house of the middle class, through Royal Barry Wills, a Boston architect who from 1925 built and published hundreds of Capes for families of modest means, with the proportions of the originals, the steep roof, the central chimney and the shingles, and the plan modernised with a kitchen, a bathroom and bedrooms in the loft under dormers; his book "Houses for Good Living" of 1940 and his winning the "Better Homes in America" competitions made the Cape the American ideal, and in 1938 the Federal Housing Administration, which insured mortgages, published its "Principles of Planning Small Houses" with the Cape as the model of the house it would finance: 750 to 1,000 square feet, a rectangle, a steep roof for an expandable attic, no porch, no ornament, and a plan that could be built for 5,000 dollars. The Cape became the house of the New Deal and of the war workers' towns.

The suburban Cape: Levittown, 1947–1955

After the war the Levitt brothers, who had built Capes for the Navy at Norfolk, laid out Levittown on Long Island in 1947 with 6,000 and then 17,447 houses, at first all Capes: 750 square feet, four and a half rooms, a living room with a picture window, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bath, an unfinished attic with the stair to it ready for two more bedrooms, on a concrete slab with radiant heating, with a Bendix washer and a television, for 7,990 dollars, or 58 dollars a month with no down payment for a veteran, built on an assembly line of 27 steps at a rate of 30 a day; the buyers added dormers, wings and garages as they could, and the Levittown Cape with its dormers is the American house of 1950. Every suburb of the 1940s and 50s has its Capes, on 50-foot lots, with a breezeway to the garage from 1950 and a picture window, and the ranch replaced it after 1955 as the lots got wider and the families richer; about a fifth of American houses are Capes, by the loosest count.

How to recognise a Cape Cod house

• Shape. A rectangle, one and a half storeys, wider than it is tall, the roof taking up half the height.
• Roof. A steep gable, side-gabled so that the ridge runs parallel to the street, with almost no overhang at the eaves or the gable ends; on the revival and suburban ones, one or two or three dormers in the front slope, gabled or shed, which the originals never had.
• Chimney. A large one in the centre of the ridge on the originals and the good revivals; on the suburban Cape often at one end, with a furnace instead of fires.
• Front. Symmetrical, the door in the centre with a plain surround, windows of six-over-six or nine-over-six panes either side, with shutters; no porch, at most a small hood or stoop.
• Walls. Cedar shingles left grey on the coast, white clapboard inland, and on the suburban ones asbestos shingle, aluminium and vinyl siding; white with black or green shutters is the revival's colour.
• Inside. On the original, a tiny entry against the chimney with a steep stair, a room either side and the kitchen behind, low ceilings and wide pine floors; on the revival, a centre hall or a living room across the front, the kitchen and bath behind, and the bedrooms upstairs.

Cape, Colonial, saltbox, ranch

• Colonial. The full two storeys with the same symmetrical front and central door, and a chimney at each end in the Georgian version; a Cape is a Colonial with the second floor inside the roof, and the revival "Cape Cod Colonial" is the same thing.
• Saltbox. The New England house of 1650–1750 with two storeys in front and one behind under a roof that slopes down long at the back, like the box salt came in; a Cape with a lean-to gives the same profile at one storey.
• Garrison. The two-storey house whose upper floor overhangs, of the 1600s and the 1950s revival.
• Ranch. The one-storey house of the 1950s with a low roof and a wide front, which replaced the Cape in the suburbs; a Cape is tall and compact, a ranch long and low.
• Minimal traditional. The FHA house of the 1930s and 40s with a lower roof and a front gable, the Cape's plainer sibling, which is what many "Capes" of 1945 are.
• Cottage. A small house of any style; a Cape is a cottage of one style.

Where to see them

• Cape Cod. The Old King's Highway, Route 6A, through Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis and Brewster, with hundreds of originals; the Atwood House in Chatham (1752), the Hoxie House in Sandwich (1675), a saltbox, and the Josiah Dennis Manse (1736), museums; Provincetown's streets.
• Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Grey-shingled Capes on every lane, the whole of Siasconset.
• New England. Old Sturbridge Village's Capes, the coast of Maine, Connecticut's shore, and the Yankee towns of upstate New York and the Western Reserve of Ohio, where the emigrants built them in the 1820s.
• Levittown, New York and Pennsylvania. The Capes of 1947–48 on the original lanes, mostly enlarged past recognition, with a few kept as built; the Levittown Historical Society's museum.
• Everywhere. The suburban Cape of 1935–55 is on the first ring of every American city, in Queens, the suburbs of Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Versions and theories

• The Cape is the oldest American house type. One of the oldest, from about 1690, with the saltbox and the hall-and-parlor house before it; the oldest standing Capes are of about 1700.
• Dormers are original. The old Capes had none; the loft was lit by windows in the gable ends; dormers are the revival's way of making the attic bedrooms, and a Cape with dormers is after 1920.
• Capes were moved on rollers. Many were, built on sills without foundations and dragged by oxen to a new lot or across the ice; Provincetown's houses were moved from Long Point across the harbour on barges in the 1850s.
• Levittown was all Capes. The first 6,000 of 1947–48 were; from 1949 the Levitts built ranches, and the Pennsylvania Levittown of 1952 had six models, none a Cape.
• Grey shingles are a colour choice. They are cedar left unpainted and weathered by salt; inland Capes were painted, and the "Cape Cod grey" of the paint chart is an imitation.
• The Cape is a cheap house. It was designed to be: the FHA's model and Levitt's assembly line; the originals on the Cape sell for millions now, and Wills's revivals are the best-built small houses in America.

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