The Shingle Style had its genesis in the Boston area in the early 1880s. Over the next two decades it spread across the country, although it was favored for the rambling seaside estates and resorts of the New England coast. Like the Queen Anne style, the Shingle style was influenced initially by the work of the architect Richard Norman Shaw, but replacing his tile-hanging by shingle-hanging.

Henry Hobson Richardson (1836-86) is credited with developing the style and used it for most of his country and suburban houses, as did many prominent architects. The pioneer building is the Sherman House at Newport, Rhode Island, by Henry Hobson Richardson (1874). McKim, Mead and White also participated. The masterpiece is Richardson's Stoughton House at Cambridge, Massachusetts (1882-3).

In masonry buildings, the style was known as Richardson Romanesque

Shingle style borrows wide porches, its shingled surfaces, and asymmetrical forms from Queen Anne style, but practioners opened up the interior space and made a lot fewer rooms; the rooms were a lot bigger, it was easier for light to penetrate the interior.

Features

• Two or three stories tall
  
• Spreads low against the ground on a heavy stone foundation
  
• Qualities of weight, density, and permanence are pronounced
  
• Masonry is dark and rough-hewn
  
• Asymmetrical forms
• Shingles were available in many colors, such as the Indian reds, olive greens and deep yellows, which were popular at the time
  
• Shingles form a continuous covering, stretched smooth over roof lines and around corners in a kind of contoured envelope
  
• Rounded contours sheltered by a broad and overhanging roof. The sweep of the roof may continue to the first floor level providing cover for porches, or is steeply pitched and multi-planed.
• Entries are defined by heavy (often low) arches; columns are short and stubby
  
• Wide porches
  
• The eaves of the roof are close to the walls so as not to distract from the homogeneous and monochromatic shingle covering
  
• Broad gables
  
• Casement and sash windows are generally small, may have many lights, and often are grouped into twos or threes
  
• The curving "eyebrow" dormer is distinctive
  
• Interior: free-flowing plan
  
• Interior: large rooms and porches loosely arranged around an open "great hall," dominated by a grand staircase.

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