What is a Tudor style house? The half-timbering, the steep roofs, the tall chimneys, the real Tudor of 1500 and the American Tudor Revival of 1920, and how to tell them apart

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A Tudor style house, in the sense the words are used in America, is a house of about 1890 to 1940 in the Tudor Revival style: steep roofs with several gables facing the street, walls of brick, stone or stucco with decorative half-timbering, dark boards on light plaster, in the upper storeys and gables, tall narrow windows in groups with leaded or diamond panes, an arched front door in a stone surround, and a massive chimney with several clustered pots, all imitating the houses of Tudor England of 1485–1603, whose real timber frames, jettied upper floors and wattle-and-daub walls are the model; the revival came from the English Arts and Crafts architects of the 1890s, crossed to America with the country houses of the rich, and became the "Stockbroker Tudor" of the suburbs of the 1920s, the second most common house of that decade after the Colonial Revival. Below: the real Tudor houses and how they were built, the revival and its American form, the features to look for, the differences from the styles it is mixed up with, where to see them, what they cost and what goes wrong, and the myths, with the other houses of the era in American house styles and the Craftsman in what is a Craftsman house.

The real Tudor house, 1485–1603

The Tudors, Henry VII to Elizabeth I, ruled England from 1485 to 1603, and the houses of their time were built the way English houses had been built for three centuries, of a frame of oak posts and beams, cut and pegged together on the ground, raised, and filled between the timbers with wattle and daub, woven hazel plastered with clay and dung, or with brick in a herringbone; the timbers were left showing, blackened only in the Victorian age, and the upper floors were jettied, projecting over the lower on the ends of the joists, to gain space and to shelter the wall below. The windows were small, of leaded diamond panes, since glass came in small pieces, in casements that opened out; the roofs were steep, of thatch, tile or stone, to shed rain from the wattle; and the chimney was the great novelty, brick, since the Tudor age was when the smoke hole gave way to the fireplace, and the chimneys of Hampton Court's 241 stacks are twisted, moulded and clustered as the age's ornament. The gentry built in brick with stone dressings, at Hampton Court (1515), Hatfield and Sutton Place, with the four-centred Tudor arch over the door and the mullioned windows in grids; the yeomen built the black-and-white houses of Cheshire and Herefordshire, Little Moreton Hall (1504–1610), Speke Hall and the streets of Chester, Shrewsbury and Stratford, where Shakespeare's birthplace is a Tudor house. Tudor Revival architecture.

The revival, 1890–1940

The English Arts and Crafts architects of the 1880s and 90s, Richard Norman Shaw, Ernest George and Edwin Lutyens, revived the timbered manor for the country houses of the new rich, and the style spread to the suburbs of London, where the "Tudorbethan" semi of the 1920s and 30s, with its half-timbered gable over a bay window, was built by the hundred thousand in Metroland and is the English suburban house; in America the style came in the 1890s for the mansions of the Gilded Age, Stan Hywet in Akron (1915) and the estates of Long Island's North Shore, and in the 1920s, when brick veneer and stucco made it cheap, it became the house of the professional suburbs of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, "Stockbroker Tudor", the name a joke of Osbert Lancaster's in 1938 for the banker's fake manor; a quarter of the houses of the 1920s in some suburbs are Tudor, and the style died with the Second World War, when the minimal traditional house and then the ranch replaced it, and came back as "Tudor" in the builders' catalogues of the 1980s.

How to recognise a Tudor Revival house

• The roof. Steep, 45 degrees or more, with one or more prominent cross gables facing the street, often a tall narrow one at the front door, sometimes with a swept or "catslide" eave; slate or shingle, rarely thatch.
• The half-timbering. Boards of dark wood set into stucco in the gables and the upper storey, in vertical, diagonal and curved patterns, purely decorative, nailed to the wall over a frame of ordinary studs; below it, brick or stone.
• The walls. Brick, often in patterns and with stone quoins, on the ground floor, stucco with timbering above, and stone trim around the door and windows; a mixture of materials on one house is the sign.
• The windows. Tall and narrow, in groups of three or more, casements with leaded panes in diamonds or rectangles, sometimes bays and oriels projecting from the upper floor, with stone or wood mullions.
• The door. Under a round or Tudor four-centred arch in a stone surround, of vertical boards with iron strap hinges, often in its own gabled porch or a small tower.
• The chimney. Massive, of brick or stone, on the front or side, with two or three clustered pots, often decorated with patterns, the feature that says Tudor from the street.
• Inside. A hall with a stair, dark wood panelling and beams, a large fireplace with a stone or brick surround, plaster walls, arched doorways and leaded glass; the plan is the 1920s plan, with a living room, dining room and kitchen, and the Tudor is on the walls.

Tudor, Cotswold, French Provincial, Craftsman

• Cotswold cottage. The Tudor's small cousin, of the same decades: a low house of stone or stucco with a steep roof that sweeps down over the door, a rolled eave imitating thatch, a huge chimney and small windows, and no half-timbering; after the villages of the Cotswolds, and often called English cottage.
• French Provincial or Norman. The same steep roof but hipped rather than gabled, with a round tower at the corner and no timbering; the château of the same suburbs.
• Elizabethan and Jacobean. The revival of the later, grander Tudor of brick and stone, with curved gables, grids of windows and no timber, on the big houses.
• Craftsman. The low roof and the porch; the Tudor has a steep roof and no porch, and the two were built on the same streets by the same builders.
• Mock Tudor. The British name for the revival, with the sneer; the half-timbering is mock on every revival house, and on many "real" ones restored in the 1900s.
• Real Tudor. Timber frame that holds the house up, wattle and daub, jetties, small windows, in England and nowhere in America, except for the few houses shipped over in pieces, like Agecroft Hall in Richmond, Virginia, a Lancashire manor of 1500 re-erected in 1926.

Where to see them

• England. Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, the most crooked timber house in the world; Speke Hall, Liverpool; Hampton Court and Hatfield for the brick Tudor; the Shambles in York and the streets of Chester, Shrewsbury, Lavenham and Stratford; Anne Hathaway's cottage.
• American mansions. Stan Hywet Hall, Akron, Ohio (1915), 65 rooms, open; Coe Hall at Planting Fields, Long Island (1921); the Edsel Ford house, Grosse Pointe (1929), of Cotswold stone; Agecroft and Virginia House in Richmond.
• Suburbs. Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, the first Tudor suburb, 1909; Shaker Heights, Cleveland; Palmer Woods, Detroit; the Main Line of Philadelphia; Kenilworth and Oak Park, Chicago; Hancock Park and Los Feliz, Los Angeles; Country Club District, Kansas City; Tuxedo Park, New York.
• Britain's suburbs. Metroland and every arterial road of the 1930s; Port Sunlight and Bournville, the model villages; Letchworth, the first garden city.

Prices, problems and the market

A 1920s Tudor is a brick house with stucco panels, and it lasts: the problems are the half-timbering, whose boards are nailed over the stucco and let water behind them so that the stucco cracks and the boards rot, the leaded windows, which leak and cannot be double-glazed without losing the look, the slate roof, expensive to repair at its pitch, and the dark interiors that buyers now paint; Tudors sell at a premium in the old suburbs where they cluster, below the Craftsman and above the Colonial in most markets, and the big ones of the North Shore and the Main Line are the estates of the region. New Tudors, built since the 1980s with vinyl boards on siding, are "Tudor" in the way a Craftsman-style house is Craftsman.

Versions and theories

• The beams hold the house up. On a real Tudor house, yes, and they were the house; on a Tudor Revival house they are boards nailed to a stud wall, and the brick below carries the floors.
• Tudor houses were black and white. The oak was left its own silver-grey and the plaster was lime-white or ochre; the black tar and white lime are Victorian, from the 1860s, and the "magpie" look of Cheshire is a restoration.
• The Tudor house is English. The real one is; the revival is British and American, and the American suburb built more of it than England ever had.
• Tudor and Elizabethan are the same. Elizabeth was a Tudor, and her age's houses are the grand brick and stone ones; "Tudor" in the revival means the timbered yeoman house of Henry VIII's time.
• The style was for the rich. In 1900, yes; by 1928 a Tudor was a 5,000-dollar house from a plan book, and Sears sold one.
• Stockbroker Tudor is an American term. Osbert Lancaster's, in "Pillar to Post" of 1938, for the Surrey stockbroker's house; the Americans took it.

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