Queen Anne: Eclectic, Ornate

How many well-known and prominent men are there who can in no small measure attribute their success to their architects, for designing and producing for them, homes or buildings striking and commanding and holding one’s attention?

--Architect J. Cather Newsom

The “striking and commanding” homes of Newsom’s ringing phrases were designed--many by Newsom himself--in the flamboyant, late-Victorian style known as Queen Anne.

At the height of its fashion during the 1880s and ‘90s, the Queen Anne, and its companion style, known as Eastlake, graced California’s most elegant suburbs. The homes were distinguished by their steep slate roofs, fretworked timber gables, bonneted turrets and painted spindle-work porches.

Superseded by the rage for Craftsman architecture at the turn of the century, Queen Anne-Eastlake homes stand as reminders of the frantic Los Angeles land boom of the late-1800s, which converted districts such as Bunker Hill and Angelino Heights into gracious neighborhoods.

The name Queen Anne is historically ambiguous. Originated in Britain in the 1860s by architect Richard Norman Shaw, the late-Victorian Queen Anne-style bears no relation to the style of the period of the real English Queen Anne, who reigned briefly in the early 18th Century.

Queen Anne-style had become even more eclectic by the time it arrived on the West Coast, following its popularization in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.

In its passage across the continent, it collected a variety of extra details and mannerisms, derived from the East Coast Eastlake-style, plus elements of Victorian Romanesque, Rococo and Renaissance Revival, with added exotic bits and pieces copied from Moorish and Oriental architecture.

“Where does Newsom get his ideas?” Queen Anne popularizer Newsom asked rhetorically in his 1895 book “Artistic City Buildings, Flats and Residences.”

Revealing that the source of his inspiration was a large library of books and photographs, he said: “It is from these I take new features, taking a feature here and there, and making a happy result.”

Queen Anne’s elaborate details and construction were made both possible and affordable by the modern technology of the Industrial Revolution.

At its heart was the innovative lightweight “balloon” frame that allowed whole sections of timber framing to be prefabricated and assembled on site.

The balloon frame, now standard in all timber house construction, replaced the traditional mortise-and-tenon post-and-beam framing that was heavier and more labor intensive.

Historically nostalgic Queen Anne details such as fretwork and friezes became cheap to make through the use of new inventions, such as the iron steam press and the scroll jigsaw, which could economically sculpt wood into decorative designs.

Queen Anne was a typically Victorian mixture of stylistic nostalgia and technological innovation, said architectural historian David Gebhard.

“It was an age marked by a passionate, evangelistic belief in progress, countered by a clinging to the cultural reassurance of the architecture of the past,” Gebhard said. “The idea of the modern was fused with a longing for the ancient.”

The Victorians tried to look backward and forward at the same time, Gebhard explained, toward a brave new world of technical miracles and a mythologized history of social stability and moral order.

“They reacted ambiguously to the speed of change,” he said, “mixing a rejection with an embrace.”

Being “modern” was very much the rage among the late-Victorians, despite the eclectic nostalgia of their architecture. It was a prime concern for Newsom and his brother, Samuel, who led the fashion for Queen Anne in California from their offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In their pattern books and periodicals, which were copied by many other architects and builders, the Newsoms warned the public to “Avoid the old fogy architects, who have had their day . . . on account of their not keeping up and being posted on all that is new and latest.”

And Southern California in the 1880s was the Promised Land of “all that is new and latest.”

Rapid Transformation

Recently made accessible by railroad connections, the Southland “awaited transformation into a Real Eden,” Gebhard said, “with a touch of the wand--water, capital and the Puritanical ethic of hard work.”

The Southland’s paradisal transformation was rapid. In the final decades of the 19th Century the trinity of water, capital and hard work, fertilized by rampant boosterism, changed a semi-desert into a flourishing city set among orange groves.

The Queen Anne-style best symbolized the endless energy and cheerful flamboyance of this newly created Californian Eden.

From San Diego to Santa Monica, Queen Anne and Eastlake homes raised their fretworked gables and perky turrets to the sky in a bold toast to progress and culture.

The heady atmosphere of the period may be savored in the Angelino Heights section of Echo Park, which boasts the finest surviving concentration of Queen Anne homes in Los Angeles.

Loving Restoration

Carroll Avenue in Angelino Heights is host to an array of Queen Anne and Eastlake homes that have been lovingly restored by young professionals in search of affordable housing with character.

Barbara and Andrew Thornburg bought 1316 Carroll Ave. in 1973. At the cost of much personal labor and considerable expense, they have restored the once-derelict 1887 Eastlake-style house, with its ship’s wheel staircase design, Lincrusta paper friezes, hand-carved fireplace surrounds and molded plaster cornices into a delightfully authentic Victorian memento.

“The house was a junkyard when we discovered it,” Barbara Thornburg recalled. “The redwood frame was riddled with dry rot. Many window frames were eaten away by termites. The place was a sad sight, like a Victorian grand dame fallen upon ruin.”

Over the next decade the Thornburgs themselves stripped every surface of old lead paint, caulked each nail and had new window frames milled to the old pattern. The house took four years to paint in the dark-green-and-white-trim color scheme the owners carefully researched for its authenticity to the original Eastlake decor.

“Talk about sweat equity,” Barbara Thornburg said ruefully. “This place is Perspiration Palace.”

Less Ornamental

The Eastlake style, named for English furniture designer Charles Lockewood Eastlake, was less ornate than the Queen Anne, and in some ways its opposite in inspiration.

Eastlake yearned for a return to “plain ornament” in reaction to late-Victorian architectural extravagance.

But in Los Angeles, the Eastlake style--with its ornately detailed and steeply gabled roofs and “stickwork” boarding laid in a variety of patterns--was usually elaborated way beyond plainness in a fusion with Queen Anne exuberance.

A superb marriage of Queen Anne and Eastlake is found at 824 E. Kensington Road in Echo Park. The design of this 1880 mansion, probably copied by its anonymous builder from one of the popular pattern books of the period, is Queen Anne in its spritely turrets and generous porches, its multiple gables, thrusting dormers and Moorish arches. But the curlicued clarity of its white-painted fretwork is pure Eastlake.

The 1886 cottage built by Elias Jackson (Lucky) Baldwin in Arcadia is another splendid fusion of Queen Anne and Eastlake mannerisms.

Now on the grounds of the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum, the lovingly restored and furnished cottage designed by A. A. Bennett, one of the architects for the State Capitol in Sacramento, features a three-tiered turret topped by a viewing platform. Here, it is said, the eccentric millionaire would stand mournful watch for his fourth wife, who left him before the house was finished.

Late-Victorian interiors were stuffed with a mixture of furnishings as eclectic as their exteriors. Every inch of surface in the walls, doors, windows and ceilings pulsated with opulent detail and decoration.

Beds Big as Boats

Patterned parquet floors and molded redwood door frames competed for attention in the subdued light with vigorously textured wallpapers featuring busy medallions or lush floral designs. Front parlors were crowded with overstuffed deep-buttoned red-velvet armchairs and settees.

Bedrooms boasted carved and canopied beds big as boats. Richly carved, solidly crafted Rococo and Renaissance Revival rosewood sideboards were miniature architectures in their own right.

Several of the biggest and most flamboyant Queen Anne mansions designed by the Newsoms in Los Angeles--such as the magnificent 1887 Bradbury House, built by the owner of downtown’s famous Bradbury Building--vanished when Bunker Hill was flattened by bulldozers during the brutal “urban renewal” programs of the 1960s.

Popularized Style

The 1889 house built by J. Cather Newsom for dairyman Charles Sessions at 1330 Carroll Ave. is a reminder of the architect’s playful skill.

A pair of fierce stone Chinese dogs guards the steps that lead to a tier of porches with round Oriental archways mixed with Moorish spindle woodwork and a turret topped by a spiky finial bearing a weathercock.

The last word on Queen Anne must belong to Newsom, whose buildings and writings did the most to popularize the style in Southern California. Referring to the inspiration of the style, he declared:

“Architecture is an art primarily, and hardly anything else.”

RECOGNIZING QUEEN ANNE-EASTLAKE HOMES Two to three stories tall, often with a basement.

First-floor front porches, raised above ground and reached by a short flight of steps, feature spindle-work friezes and balustrades.

Steep, multicolored slate roofs, punctuated by dormers and bonneted turrets, with high fretworked gable ends.

Lower floors finished in brick or stone; upper levels have fish-scale shingles or clapboarding.

A variety of bay windows, patterned brick chimneys, oriels, stained glass and plaster swags, sometimes set off by Moorish arches, onion domes or Oriental woodwork.

Elaborately paneled entry halls, with fancy carved wooden staircases, filled with the rainbow tones of rich stained glass.

Dark main rooms, also paneled, with parquet flooring, ceilings decorated with medallions and crown moldings, wallpapered walls with friezes and wainscotting, and fireplaces of patterned tile or carved hardwood.