1874–1910 · New England, Atlantic seaboard resorts, United States
Shingle Style
Also known as American Shingle Style, Seaside Shingle
A sophisticated New England resort style wrapping irregular, flowing building masses in an unbroken skin of wood shingles — prizing horizontal continuity over applied ornament.
Photo: Dms1788, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isaac_Bell_House_2018-06-13.jpg
About the style
The Shingle Style developed in the 1870s and 1880s among fashionable architects designing summer 'cottages' for the wealthy along the New England coast at Newport, Bar Harbor, and the like. Reacting against the busy, polychrome detailing of the Queen Anne and Stick styles, it sought a quieter, more unified expression by sheathing entire houses — walls, gables, towers, and sweeping roofs alike — in a continuous membrane of cedar shingles. The result is an architecture of surface and silhouette: complex, asymmetrical volumes flow into one another beneath broad gambrel or gabled roofs, while deep wraparound porches, eyebrow dormers, and rounded towers create a romantic, sculptural play of light and shadow. Drawing on Colonial American precedents, the contemporary English Queen Anne, and Henry Hobson Richardson's bold massing, designers like McKim, Mead & White elevated it into a confident, distinctly American manner. Though relatively short-lived and exclusive, the Shingle Style profoundly shaped later American domestic architecture and enjoys recurring revivals at the shore.
Notable examples
- ▸Isaac Bell House (Newport)
- ▸Kragsyde (Manchester-by-the-Sea)
- ▸William G. Low House (Bristol)
Anatomy of Shingle Style
The numbered markers call out the design elements that define this style. Hover or tap a marker to see its breakdown.
Photo: Dms1788, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isaac_Bell_House_2018-06-13.jpg
Broad gabled and gambrel roof planes sweep down over the asymmetrical mass, emphasizing surface and continuity over detail.
A cylindrical shingled tower swells from the corner, adding romantic, sculptural movement to the silhouette.
Cedar shingles sheathe walls, gables, and tower as one unbroken membrane — the defining gesture that unifies the whole composition.
A recessed, shadowed porch carves into the volume, blurring the line between solid mass and sheltered outdoor room.
How Shingle Style connects
Styles form a network, not a tree. Explore the direct neighbours below — click any to travel the map one hop at a time.
- Parallel / cross-current
- Influenced by
Parallel / cross-current Queen Anne — closely related to and partly emerging from the Queen Anne, trading its busy ornament for a unified shingle surface
Influenced by Colonial Revival — draws on early American colonial forms, paralleling the rising Colonial Revival of the same decades
Influenced by Richardsonian Romanesque — credited to Richardson's bold, simplified massing, here translated from stone into wood
Describe it like this
Prompt-ready vocabulary for describing or re-creating the Shingle Style look.