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Bungalow-Down: Origins of
BUNGALOW-DOWN:
Origins of the Craftsman bungalow housing form on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
The bungalow housing form can be found throughout the Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage area. The bungalow’s hey-day, from roughly 1905 to 1935, was a period where the Coast’s population, specifically Harrison County, doubled, speaking to why bungalows can be found so frequently in the area, even after 100 years. The homes are representative of the end of the Victorian era, whose architecture expressed a verticality, along with opulence and excess, with homes that are horizontally oriented and stress simplicity in design and materials. The housing form bungalow in the United States began as a casual space, a retreat, from the formality of Victorian life in the country, mountains, or seaside. As often happens when folks are on vacation they begin to ask, “why can’t we have this carefree lifestyle every day?” And with that, elements of the bungalow form began to creep into everyday residential design. Fueling this development on a national level was the rise of the middle class, a demographic which could not afford larger or extravagantly detailed homes popular during the Victorian era. Additionally, bungalows were generally considered small enough that the house could be kept by the residents themselves and did not require domestic help.
D efined as a one-story house with a low-pitch roof, a bungalow is usually a modest and inexpensive home. The word itself derived from the Hindi word ‘bangla’, or house in Bengali, and was used frequently in 19th newspaper accounts as a romanticized reference to homes in colonial territories located in Southeast Asian. The term came into popular use for housing in the United States after the frequent use of it to describe the smaller buildings built by states and other organizations across the fair grounds of the 1904 World’s Fair held in St. Louis. (Mississippi’s building at the 1904 fair was a replica of Beauvoir ¼ scale of the real Beauvoir house in Biloxi.) While over 19 million people attended the fair, that alone was not enough to spread the popularity of the term bungalow and its form far and wide. Just like today, our ancestors turned to trend setting style guides, and magazines began to fill that role, having become much more common after the turn of the century. Perhaps the most prominent of these was The Ladies Home Journal was a highly influential residential taste setter for much of the late 19th and early 20th century, and in 1903 became the first American magazine to have a circulation of more than one million copies. In addition to giving hints and tips on household care, the periodical published modest house plans. Magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal spread the popularity of terms like “Bungalow” along with the house form’s appearance. On March 26, 1909, Northrop’s Department Store in Gulfport published an advertisement in the Biloxi Daily Herald that the store carried the latest edition of the Ladies Home Journal, which featured a center spread of bungalows, “Just big enough for two,” that ranged in price from $400 to $1,800. Featured among the houses on the two-page spread was a plan designed by Pasadena, California architect Arthur Samuel Barnes that was described as, “A Well-Planned Mission Bungalow for $1,830.” Topping out just over the previously stated $1,800, the Ladies Home Journal describes the five-room home as such…
“All the rooms of this compactly planned bungalow open into the living-room, making any hallways unnecessary. The ends of the living-room are almost entirely of glass and the rear there is a pretty pergola court which makes the back of the house quite as attractive as the front. The exterior walls up to the window-line are constructed of vertical one-by-twelve-inch boards with battens, and above this they are shingled. Brick has been used to form the base of the substantial porch and pergola column. What bride would not be delighted to live in this artistic little home?” 1
If the price for all that sounds too good to be true, it probably was. The Vicksburg Evening Post published the following joke in 1908:2
Client looking over several architectural designs: Ah, That’s pretty! What is that? Architect: That is a fifteen-hundred-dollar bungalow. Client: What will it cost to build it? Architect: About eight thousand dollars.
Regardless of the price, someone was interested enough to build four of these bungalows in Biloxi. Their exact date of construction or the builder is unknown, but the buildings appear to have been completed before 1914.
One house was constructed at 134 Seal Avenue, while the other three lined the south side of East Howard Avenue a 497, 491, 485 in Biloxi. The latter of these have been destroyed, except the Seal Avenue bungalow. While described in the article as a “Mission Bungalow” it is clearly more in line with what today would be called a Craftsman Style Bungalow, with its low-pitched roof with wide overhangs, exposed roof rafters, decorative beams or braces under the gables, porches that are full, or partial width, with roof supported by square columns with bases that continue to the ground level.
The popularity of the bungalow form also coincided with the rise in popularity of the Craftsman Style. Nearly ubiquitous with the term bungalow, the Craftsman Style originated in California before rapidly spreading throughout the United States thanks to the widespread popularity of magazines such The Craftsman. Edited by Gustave Stickley (1856-1942), a New York based furniture manufacturer, he was an ardent promoter of the English Arts and Crafts Style of architecture and decoration. Stickley published the periodical The Craftsman beginning in 1901 until 1916. The magazine’s title is said to be the origin for the naming of the Craftsman Style of architectural and decorative design. The Craftsman Style was the most popular style for small houses constructed in America between c.1905 through the 1930’s, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast was no different. The style arose as a reaction to the industrialized production and the often-ornate aesthetic of the Victorian periods' architecture styles. Styles such as the Queen Anne Style had been wildly embraced by the public due to the pattern books and pre-cut architectural details made widely available thanks to the national network of railroad lines.
“We not only imitate foreign ideals in our architecture, but we have become artificial and unreal in all the detail of the finish and fittings of our homes." - The Art of Building a Home by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. 1901
The Craftsman movement placed emphasis on design elements in which a builder’s hand could be readily seen, with designs that emphasized exposed joinery, and simplified woodwork. This favored more simplistic (albeit still machine-made) detailing versus the elaborate carvings that came to define architecture and designs of the Victorian period (roughly 1820-1914).
Both the, Bungalow form and the Craftsman Style fell out of favor near the end of the 1930’s across the United States as modern, streamline designs became more popular, along with the rise of the Ranch House, which became the dominant housing form in the United States during the second half of the 20th century.
MAIL ORDER PLANS VS. KIT HOUSES
The bungalow house featured in the 1909 Ladies Home Journal article is an example of a mail order plan house. At the beginning of the 19th century, architects would advertise house plans for sale in newspapers and magazines, where through the mail but would be responsible to locate and buy the materials then build the house yourself. Beginning in the mid-19th century, building material entrepreneurs began the practice of selling complete house kits, where all the materials needed to construct the house would be sent along with the plans. However, it was not until transportation costs became increasingly cheaper after the turn of the 20th century that kit houses took off in popularity. While often referred to as “Sears Homes”, in reality, dozens of companies shipped homes all across North America. The following are some of the kit house companies that started in the 20th century, along with the location of their corporate headquarters, and year of founding.
•Bennett Homes, North Tonawanda, New York – 1902 •Aladdin Homes, Bay City, Michigan – 1906 •Gordon-Van Tine Homes, Davenport, Iowa – 1907 •Sears Modern Homes, Sears, Roebuck, Chicago – 1908 •Montgomery Ward, Chicago, Illinois – 1910 •Fenner Factory Cut Homes, North Portland, Oregon – 1912 •Hewitt-Lea-Funck Company, Seattle, Washington – 1912 •Harris Homes, Chicago, Illinois – 1913 •Sterling Homes, International Mill and Timber Company,
Bay City, Michigan – 1925
FEATURES OF CRAFTSMAN STYLE HOUSES
• Wood Siding types are shingle, board and batten, clapboard. Some examples have multiple siding types used. • ‘battered walls' that slope out at the foundation level. • multi-pane sash over sash with one large pane • Triangular braced supports in the eaves. • Extended or elaborate rafter ends. • Trellised porch or porte-cochere roof • Porch posts with ‘battered' or sloped sides.
FORM VS STYLE
Architectural forms refer to a building’s composition. Examples are bungalow, mansion, cottage, shotgun.
Architectural style refers to a building’s common attributes in the arraignment of major design elements. Examples are; Craftsman Style, Greek Revival Style, Art Deco Style, Queen Anne Style.
LIFE
