STICK STYLE MOULDING PROFILES & GALLERY
ABOUT STICK STYLE ARCHITECTURE
Architect Richard Morris Hunt, who shaped the Gilded Age in New York City, is the pioneer of Stick Style. While studying in France he was inspired by a revival of half-timbered buildings resembling Medieval German villages. In addition, Stick Style is a hybrid of “Swiss cottage” folk houses from 1850s American plan books along with shared traits of English Tudor and Gothic elements. Its peak era was during the 1870s and 1880s and was popularized only in America. Unique features include a steeply pitched gable roof, cross gables, decorative trusses at the gable peak, overhanging eaves with exposed rafters, wood exterior walls with clapboards, rectangular windows, horizontal, vertical or diagonal decorative wood trim stickwork, and porches with diagonal or curved braces and towers. Stately homes on the East Coast such as the Mark Twain House is a fine example of Stick Style architecture.
STICK STYLE MOULDINGS
The stick style literally employs “sticks” to define stylized posts, beams and braces and is characterized by surfaces broken into the angular sections between these ‘sticks’. The profiles of mouldings used are chamfers, quarter rounds, coves, and the cyma recta and reversa. The planar surfaces are characterized by the repetition of vertical, horizontal and diagonal boards, grooves, and saw-toothed edges.
HISTORY OF STICK STYLE ARCHITECTURE
Emerging during an age when American architecture was discovering a distinctly expressive language in wood, the Stick Style flourished principally between 1860 and 1890. It developed from the picturesque traditions of the Gothic Revival while anticipating the greater complexity and exuberance of the Queen Anne style that followed. Advances in balloon-frame construction and mechanized woodworking allowed builders to create increasingly intricate wooden buildings, while architectural pattern books helped circulate fashionable designs throughout the country. Richard Morris Hunt’s John N. A. Griswold House, completed in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1864, is widely recognized as one of the earliest mature expressions of the style.
The defining character of Stick architecture arose from the application of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal boards across exterior walls, visually suggesting the wooden framework concealed beneath the siding. Although this stickwork was generally decorative rather than structural, it divided the façade into carefully articulated panels and gave the building a sense of order beneath its picturesque composition. Steeply pitched roofs extended into projecting gables enriched by decorative trusses, while bracketed porches and wooden ornament carved or sawn into intricate designs cast shifting patterns of shadow across walls enlivened by patterned shingles. Through this union of structural suggestion and ornamental craftsmanship, the Stick Style transformed the possibilities of wood construction and formed an important bridge between the romantic architecture of the mid-nineteenth century and the richly varied houses of the late Victorian era.
