The
Queen Anne Style
The Queen Anne style is not the same as eighteenth-century English Queen Anne furniture and silver or Richard Norman Shaw's medievalized nineteenth- century architecture in England. Designs are somewhat more controlled, at least in comparison with the wild manipulations of the late 1880s. Fashionable in the late 1880s and 1890s, these new houses delighted in varied room shapes and grand interior plans. They often employed a variety of materials on their exteriors including intricately patterned shingle work and fancy plasterwork. Curves now appeared in round corner towers, semicircular or three-quarter-circle bay windows, and arched entrances. Ornament started to become more "classical," that is, based on motifs from ancient Greece and Rome. Decorative woodwork became less angular than that of the Aesthetic taste of the Eastlake style. Laurel wreaths, flowing ribbons, and flaming torches were favorite Queen Anne decorative touches. There was a steady movement toward control and refinement. In San Francisco, Queen Anne houses brought back gable roofs, succeeding the flat roofs of the earlier Italianate and Eastlake houses. Luxurious Queen Anne houses favored round corner towers with curved glass windows, a new and ostentatious invention. One neighborhood that was building in the 1890s was the Haight Ashbury near Golden Gate Park, and many Queen Anne row houses still line its streets. Large Queen Anne houses are also found in Pacific Heights.