Features: Pedimented gable ends, portico or full-width porch with classical columns, 6-over-6 windows with pediments. Americans, newly enamored with Greek democracy, built civic buildings that looked like Greek temples. The fashion for columns and pediments seeped into residential architecture as far as the most rural farmland, popularized through pattern books by Asher Benjamin and Minard Lafever.
Federal
Alamy Dates: 1780 to 1820 Features: Symmetrical facade; 6-over-6 double-hung windows with shutters; paneled door with elaborate surround (pediment, pilasters, sidelights, and fanlight); dentil molding or other decoration at cornice. Based almost entirely on the English Adamesque style, the American Federal (or Adam) style took its cues from ancient Roman architecture. This was the first style of the newly formed United States, and it had a place in nearly every part of the country—particularly in bustling urban areas like Salem, Massachusetts, where this former This Old House TV project is located.
Georgian
Alamy Dates: 1700 to 1780 Features: Symmetrical facade; double-hung windows with nine or 12 lights in each sash; paneled door with pilasters, transom lights, and sometimes a pedimented crown; brick in the South, clapboards in the North; dentil molding at the cornice.
American Georgian architecture is based on earlier European styles (not the British Georgian style of the same period), which emphasized classical Greek and Roman shapes. Georgian houses could be found in every part of the colonies in the 18th century.
Saltbox
Alamy
Dates: 1607 to early 1700s
Features: Steeply pitched (catslide) roof that reaches to first story in the back; massive central chimney; small windows of diamond paned casements or double-hung sash with nine or 12 lights.
Most saltboxes existed in and around New England. Their steep roof pitch is a holdover from the days of thatching, but early settlers learned that wood shingles were better at sloughing off snow and rain. Few original saltboxes survive, and many are museums, like this house in East Hampton, New York.
Dates: up to 1850s.
Features: Log walls; one- to three-room layout, sometimes with a center passage (called a dogtrot).
The earliest settler houses went up quickly, using the most abundant material around—wood—to protect against the harsh weather. Log cabins were common in the middle Atlantic colonies, like this Appalachian house.
Contrast the importance of house-destruction, tent dwelling and house rebuilding in the wake of many natural disasters.
Houses of particular historical significance (former residences of the famous, for example, or even just very old houses) may gain a protected status in town planning as examples of built heritage or of streetscape.
Thus, a vast and elaborate house may serve as a sign of conspicuous wealth whereas a low-profile house built of recycled materials may indicate support of energy conservation.