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Early Twentieth-Century Building Styles Architectural design in the early 20th century presented the country with a new group of styles less dependent on historical models than were the styles of the preceding Victorian period. As with other major stylistic periods, commencement or concluding dates are not precise, and various popular styles frequently overlap. For example, Victorian cottages in styles such as the Queen Anne were built contemporaneously with bungalows. One of the most visible features of the Bungalow, Arts and Crafts, Prairie School, and other styles of the early 20th century was a lack of the busy three-dimensional ornamentation so popular in the Victorian period. This is not to say that the new architecture lacked ornamentation altogether, but it was more reserved and less three dimensional. Utah’s building tradition quickly absorbed the Bungalow, Arts and Crafts, and Prairie School styles during this period of economic prosperity. The origin of the Bungalow house type has been traced to a dwelling common in India and noted for its verandas. Its popularity in the United States, and particularly Utah, was due in part to the American Arts and Crafts movement. The bungalow was intended to be a comfortable-looking, low profile house that communicated a sense of shelter. This new type of residence became an Everyman’s house, replacing the Victorian cottage of the 1880s and the 1890s. The bungalow came to be a style as well as a building type, and numerous builders’ magazines and pattern books (published by such companies as “Bungalowcraft” of Los Angeles) sketched out many variations on the basic Bungalow. Proponents touted these plans as open and informal in nature and spatially economical. In early 20th-century Utah, as in other areas of the developing western United States, particularly California, the bungalow became one of the most popular residences. Its popularity in California led to a subtype that the designs of the brothers Charles and Henry Greene of Pasadena further enhanced. Thus, a prototypical “California bungalow” was a one-story (two stories on occasion) wood-frame house with a low-pitched roof and partially exposed framing members in its gable ends.
