While you might not know what distinguishes a Cape Cod-style home from a ranch house, casual architecture fans will likely recognize a Tudor—even if they’ve never seen one in person. During its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, Tudor Revival homes, which could usually be found in suburbs outside of northern cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, provided the antithesis of the popular, classic Colonial Revival house.
Charming Tudor Revival homes have a few consistent architectural elements, from the use of half-timbers and a mix of masonry to diamond pane glass windows and rounded entry doors. But to really understand the style, it helps to know where it came from.
The History of Tudor Houses
Wife of William Shakespeare, Ann Hathaway, grew up in this Tudor cottage in the village of Shottery, Warwickshire, England.
“It started in England with the revival of medieval architecture,” says professor Kevin Murphy, author of The Tudor Home and Vanderbilt’s chair of history and art who teaches about 19th- and 20th-century architecture. “So you had buildings that used things like brick, and other kinds of masonry, heavy timber construction, stained glass or leaded glass windows.”
In the British Isles, the original style relied less on wood because the resource was growing scarce. “In England, by the 17th century, forest reserves had been depleted and there was much more of a tradition of building in brick and stone,” Murphy says.
With the Tudor Revival developing in the United States, starting in the 1920s, architects and builders paid homage to that original English style by using bricks, stone, stucco, timbers, and slate, even though wood was still plentiful—and cheaper. Why? In part to distinguish Tudor Revival from what was typical.
“Tudors reacted against the contemporary by using something that would have been associated with both pre-modern British architecture as well as pre-modern architecture in North America,” Murphy says. By the 1920s, modern building practices in the United States evolved to rely on things like dimenal lumber, steel, and concrete block, so the use of brick, stone, and half timbers on a Tudor Revival were for aesthetics, rather than structural reasons.
Exterior Details of a Tudor-Style House
Tudor House Materials
Materials and form are what distinguish a Tudor Revival home from other architectural styles. From the onset of the style’s popularity in the United States, the focus was, in part, to be what a Colonial-style house was not. So instead of a wood or asphalt roofing, Tudors employed slate or clay. That roof is also steeply pitched—somewhere around 13/12 compared to a Colonial Revival home’s 8/12 or 10/12 roof line, and it would often sweep very close to the ground.
Tudor Home Roof Style
With an asymmetrical design, the roof usually has very prominent gable ends and builders often embellished those sections with applied half timbers. Along with the steeper pitch, a Tudor Revival’s roofline was often accentuated with dormers or overlapping sections. It was a complex form to build, and expensive to sheath, which helped the style garner the term “stockbroker’s Tudor” in suburban developments outside of busy city centers.
Tudor Home Exterior Finishes
Tudor cladding embraced the use of masonry—brick, stone, and stucco—along with mixing those materials on a home. You’d typically see the use of red brick, especially around elements like the doorway or windows. Painted timbers created geometric patterns on the wall of the home that the builder would fill with a light-colored, contrasting stucco. Chimneys were also celebrated in Tudor design. Those heavy masonry members might be in the front of the house, but were generally larger and taller than those on Colonial houses, even when homes, by this time, were not relying on a fireplace as a primary heat source.
Tudor Home Windows
A Tudor Revival’s windows were often diamond pattern and, instead of the more typical single or double-hung construction, embraced crank-out style casement design. Long before dark windows became trendy on white, modern farmhouses, Tudor homes often accentuated the glass with dark-painted frames to match the finish on the timbers.
Stained glass is also a feature you might see in a Tudor Revival home, a nod to medieval architecture. These houses would often have a mix of narrow windows along with large bays of glass. Tudor homes typically feature an off-center front door that is embellished with arches, either on the door itself or made from masonry around the entryway.
Following WWI, demand for housing increased to accommodate a growing professional class and Tudors became popular until their hefty price tag and complex design became too intensive with WWII’s suburban building boom, which favored simpler, boxy shapes. Another design detail that proved expensive: adding a round, two-story turret.
Tudor-Style Home Interiors
A knock against Tudor-style homes is often that they can be gloomy inside because of their heavy exterior masonry cladding and wood timbers. “I think people assume that they’re dark inside, which is an unfair characteristic, having lived in one myself,” Murphy says.
That said, interiors of Tudor-style homes often mimic the exteriors with faux ceiling beams stained or painted in a dark color, masonry on the floors and around the fireplace hearth, and wood paneling.
“There was a continuity from exterior to the interior that came from a consistent interest in traditional materials that gave a handcrafted or handmade look, rather than something that was produced in a factory,” Murphy says. “The idea was similar to the Arts & Craft movement and even if wood paneling did come from a factory, they were meant to look handmade.”
Tudor Home Floorplans
The Tudor Revival floorplan, just like nearly every other aspect of the home, was designed to be different from the existing architecture of the time. Where a center hall Colonial, or Georgian plan, flanked by a stairway or hall with two rooms on either side of similar size, the rooms in a Tudor open one into another. The rooms were also different sizes and less uniform than you’d find in a Colonial.
“Since most Tudor Revival homes were built after the turn of the last century, and specifically in the 1920s, they have a wonderfully diminutive, almost storybook-like scale on the interiors,” says interior designer Bethany Adams. “With exceptions for grand estates, there is a marked contrast to the rambling Queen Anne Victorians that predate them and the ceilings are lower, the doors are smaller, everything just feels a bit more dainty.”
The use of masonry inside is often tied into the chimney visible from the outside. “In some of the grander examples of Tudor Revival, you’d find a huge living room with a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace at the end, and those make visual reference to what English called the great hall,” Murphy says.
Even in less grand spaces, the use of natural light was important, and a design consideration from the start. “While dark wood elements are certainly in a Tudor interior, in most historic homes, you’ll find that the architect usually paid close attention to natural light, considering gas or electric light sources might not have been as abundant,” Adams says. “To let light pass through rooms while maintaining privacy, elaborate fretwork panels were set in doors, or often, there were no doors between rooms at all, just decorative spandrels or arches.”
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