The Bungalow Home

In its simplest form, a bungalow is a cottage-style home that tends to have one or one and a half stories, a sloped, gabled roof with exposed rafter tails, large front windows, and a broad, inviting front porch. 

In the United States in the early 1900s, the bungalow became a dominant architectural style thanks to the Arts and Crafts movement and Craftsman architecture. Though there were other styles of bungalows, the Craftsman style bungalow was considered the classic, and it featured simple, clean, horizontal lines, an appreciation for craftsmanship, and an array of characteristics, such as:

• A wide, open porch with thick support columns that are usually squared or tapered.
• Wide, overhanging eaves.
• Double-hung or single-hung windows.
• A dominant fireplace.
• A single-story open floor plan, with little space wasted on hallways. A second story (or a half-story) was sometimes built on top of its sloping roof.
• Bedrooms located on the ground floor, with the living room at the center of the layout.

One of the Craftsman bungalow’s most well-known advocates was Gustav Stickley, furniture maker, founder, and editor of The Craftsman magazine — which sold blueprints for homes designed in the Craftsman style, in an effort to make it accessible to the masses. It was Stickley’s love of the bungalow as the embodiment of Craftsman architecture that helped propel its popularity. Ladies Home Journal was also a proponent of the bungalow, and to many, Craftsman architecture and the bungalow style became so closely entwined, they were seen as one in the same.

Bungalows can be found all over New Orleans, especially in the Gentilly,Broadmoor, and Mid-City neighborhoods. The city also developed a variation on the bungalow, which we call a raised basement home.