What is a Craftsman house? The low roof, the porch, the tapered columns, the built-ins, where it came from and how to tell it from a bungalow, a Prairie house and a ranch

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A Craftsman house is an American house of about 1905 to 1930, usually one or one and a half storeys, with a low-pitched roof of wide overhanging eaves whose rafter ends show, a deep front porch under its own roof carried on square columns that taper upward from brick or stone piers, walls of wood shingles, clapboard or stucco in earth colours, windows with several small panes over one large one, and inside, an open living room around a fireplace with built-in bookcases, benches and cabinets, all of it showing its wood and its joinery; it grew from the English Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris, was named and sold by Gustav Stickley's magazine "The Craftsman" from 1901, was perfected by the brothers Greene and Greene in Pasadena, and was built by the hundred thousand across the United States, often from mail-order kits, until the Depression, as the Craftsman bungalow. Below: where it came from, the features to recognise it by, the bungalow and the kit house, the differences from the styles it is confused with, where to see the best, what it costs, and the myths, with the houses in American house styles and the Prairie cousin in Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

Where it came from

The Arts and Crafts movement in England, of William Morris, John Ruskin and the architects Philip Webb, C.F.A. Voysey and Edwin Lutyens, from the 1860s, held that the machine had made things ugly and that honest handwork, natural materials and simple forms would make them good again, and built houses of local stone and timber with big roofs and small windows; in America the idea arrived in the 1890s and was made a style by Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker in Syracuse, New York, whose magazine "The Craftsman" ran from 1901 to 1916 and published, with the Mission oak furniture he sold, 221 house plans that readers could order, for houses that were plain, wooden, low and open, for families of the middle class without servants; the word Craftsman is his trademark. The style's masterpieces are in Pasadena, California, where Charles and Henry Greene, trained in Boston and in love with Japanese joinery, built the "ultimate bungalows" of 1907–09, the Gamble House above all, for the Procter and Gamble heirs, of Burmese teak and Oregon pine with every joint pegged and every beam rounded; and Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and the Bay Area built it in redwood. American Craftsman.

How to recognise a Craftsman house

• The roof. Low-pitched, usually a gable facing the street or the side, sometimes hipped, with eaves that overhang by 60 cm or more, the ends of the rafters exposed and often cut in a curve, and decorative beams or braces (knee braces) under the gable.
• The porch. Deep, full-width or nearly, under its own gable or the main roof, with square columns that are wider at the bottom, tapered, standing on piers of brick, cobblestone or clinker brick that continue as a low wall.
• The shape. Low and horizontal, one or one and a half storeys with dormers, wider than it is tall, hugging the ground.
• The walls. Wood shingles, clapboard, board and batten, or stucco, often two materials with shingles above and clapboard below, in browns, greens and ochres, with the trim in a contrasting colour; stone or brick at the base.
• The windows. Double-hung with a divided upper sash of four, six or nine panes over a single lower pane, in groups of two or three, with wide flat trim; a picture window flanked by narrower ones on the front.
• The door. Wide, of wood, with a row of small panes in the top third and a thick shelf under them, the "Craftsman door".
• Inside. A living room and dining room open to each other through a wide cased opening or a colonnade with bookcases, a fireplace of brick or tile with a wooden mantel and built-in bookcases or benches beside it, sometimes an inglenook, built-in china cabinets in the dining room, window seats, wainscot and box beams of stained oak or fir, and a breakfast nook; the plan is open and the wood is everywhere.
• The details. Wide roof brackets, exposed joinery, hand-hammered hardware, art tile, stained glass in the door and the built-ins, and a chimney of the same brick as the piers.

The Craftsman bungalow and the kit house

The bungalow, from the Hindi bangla, a house in the Bengal style, was a one-storey house with a veranda that the British built in India and that came to California as the ideal house for the climate in the 1890s; the Craftsman style and the bungalow form met there about 1905, and the Craftsman bungalow, a one-and-a-half-storey house with the porch under the main roof, became the American house of the 1910s and 20s, built in "bungalow courts" and on every street from Los Angeles to Chicago and Seattle. Most were not architect-designed: plan books by Stickley, Henry Wilson, the "Bungalow Man", and the Los Angeles firm of Sylvanus Marston sold plans for a few dollars, and from 1908 Sears, Roebuck sold the whole house by mail, 70,000 of them by 1940, in 370 models, the "Modern Homes", cut, numbered and shipped by rail with 30,000 pieces and a 75-page instruction book, from 650 to 2,500 dollars, with Aladdin, Montgomery Ward and Gordon-Van Tine doing the same; a Sears house can be identified by the stamped lumber and the shipping label in the joists, and whole neighbourhoods of them survive in Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The style ended with the Depression, when the Colonial Revival and the minimal traditional house replaced it, and came back in the 1980s as the most wanted old house in America.

Craftsman, bungalow, Prairie, Tudor, ranch

• Bungalow. A shape, not a style: a one or one-and-a-half storey house with a porch. Most bungalows are Craftsman; some are Spanish, Colonial or Tudor. Most Craftsman houses are bungalows; some are two storeys.
• Prairie. Frank Lloyd Wright's style of 1900–15 from Chicago: the same low roof and horizontality, but hipped roofs rather than gables, bands of casement windows, stucco and brick rather than shingles, and no visible rafters or brackets; the Craftsman is the Prairie's country cousin, and the two shared magazines and clients. The Robie House is the Prairie at its purest.
• Tudor. Steep roofs, half-timbering, tall chimneys and casements, of the same decades; the opposite roof pitch.
• Foursquare. The two-storey box with a hipped roof and a porch of 1900–30, often with Craftsman porch columns and windows; a foursquare with Craftsman details is called a Craftsman foursquare.
• Ranch. The Craftsman's grandchild of 1945–70: the low roof, the horizontality and the open plan without the porch, the wood or the craft; the porch became the carport.
• Arts and Crafts. The movement; Craftsman is the American style that came from it, and in Britain the houses are called Arts and Crafts.

Where to see the best

• Pasadena, California. The Gamble House (1908), open as a museum, and the Greenes' Blacker, Duncan-Irwin and Pratt houses; Bungalow Heaven, a neighbourhood of 800 bungalows of 1900–30, with a tour each April.
• Los Angeles. The Hollywood and Highland Park bungalows, and the Judson Studios' glass.
• Berkeley and the Bay Area. Maybeck's First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910) and the redwood houses of the Berkeley hills; Julia Morgan's houses.
• Chicago. The Chicago bungalow belt, 80,000 brick bungalows of 1910–40 in a ring around the city, a local type with Craftsman roots and a Prairie face.
• Seattle and Portland. The bungalow neighbourhoods of Wallingford, Queen Anne and Irvington.
• Syracuse, New York. Stickley's own house of 1900, the first Craftsman interior, restored and open; Craftsman Farms in New Jersey (1911), his log house, a museum.
• Elsewhere. The Sears houses of the Midwest, the Craftsman districts of Denver, Salt Lake City, Spokane, Memphis and Atlanta; the bungalow is everywhere the streetcar went.

Prices, restoration and the market

The Craftsman is the most sought-after old house in the United States, with a premium over other houses of the same age and size of 10 to 20 per cent in most markets, for its wood, its porch and its plan, and a Craftsman in Pasadena or Berkeley sells for millions; the things that go wrong are the roof, whose low pitch and wide eaves hold water and rot the rafter tails, the porch piers and columns, the foundations of the early ones, and the windows, which buyers are urged to keep rather than replace; the interiors' oak and fir were painted over in the 1950s and are stripped back now. New "Craftsman-style" houses with the tapered columns and the brackets are the best-selling traditional style of the builders since the 1990s, without the wood or the joinery, and the word on a listing means a porch and some brackets more often than a house of 1912.

Versions and theories

• Craftsman and bungalow are the same thing. Craftsman is a style, bungalow a shape; the Craftsman bungalow is the overlap, and it is most of both.
• Stickley invented the Craftsman house. He named it, published it and sold it; the Greenes, Maybeck and the plan-book architects built it, and the English invented the idea.
• Craftsman houses were handmade. The ideal was handwork; most were built by contractors from plan books with machine-milled lumber, and the Sears ones came in a boxcar. The Gamble House was handmade.
• A house with tapered columns is a Craftsman. A house with tapered columns has a Craftsman porch, which may be on a foursquare, a Colonial or a house of 2015.
• The Craftsman is the first modern American house. With the Prairie house, it is the first American house designed for a family without servants, with an open plan and built-in furniture, which is the modern house.
• Sears houses are rare. 70,000 were sold, and tens of thousands stand, mostly unrecognised; Sears kept no list, and identification is by the lumber stamps and the catalogues.

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