alow Style

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Bungalow Style

A Major Influence on later Federation Style:

Bungalow style

The Bungalow was usually a single-storey house with a prominent verandah, especially with the roof covering the verandah.

The bungalow house originated in the sub-continent, and fused many ideas and thoughts about the nature of housing and life styles during the period from 1913 to 1927. It reached a zenith in both style and popularity during the 1920s and carried well beyond 1930. (Donald Johnson)

The Bungalow style originated in California USA, while its name is derived from 'bangla', a Hindu term for the style 'belonging to Bengal'. Our term 'verandah' is also derived from the Hindi 'varanda'. (Peter Cuffley)

Bungalow Characteristics

A cottage, usually of one storey, often of four-square rooms, unless architecturally designed
Having a sweeping low-pitched roof and low chimney(s)
With a prominent verandah, or surrounded by a wide verandah, which at least extends along the width of the house
Usually of timber construction, often with timber shingles
The verandah columns are prominent, often on a stone or brick base

Bungalow Style Arts and Crafts home in NSW

Gallery of Bungalow Styles

(From Wikipedia)

The meaning of the word bungalow varies internationally.

Common features of many bungalows include verandas and being low-rise.
In Australia, the California bungalow associated with the United States was popular after the First World War.
In North America and the United Kingdom, a bungalow today is a house, normally detached, that may contain a small loft. Their bungalow is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof, usually with dormer windows (one-and-a-half storeys). - Wikipedia

Wikipedia mentions many bungalow styles, usually used in English speaking countries: India, Bangladesh, English, American, Californian, and Chicago style, to name a few.

An Arts & Crafts bungalow style home in the Sydney suburb of Roseville

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Bungalow style:

From the book Australian Architecture 1901-51: Sources of Modernism by D. L. Johnson

There are two physical aspects of the bungalow.

First, there is an English idea about the (rural) bungalow as being where at a small expense we may pass a quiet weekend ‘far from the madding crowd':
- an affluent rural longing,
- with the idea of escape,
- used as recreation and
- cheaply built.
Second, the bungalow style is similar to the Bengal origin, four rooms square with a verandah.

The idea of bungalow has many architectural influences.

The Bengal style has only architectonic and aesthetic interpretations.
By the late nineteenth century the bungalow was considered an acceptable form for permanent housing. Dissemination of the style to Australia was inevitable.
The first architectural book to illustrate the design potential of the bungalow was by R. A. Briggs, Bungalows and Country Residences, published in London in 1891.

Cottage and bungalow books—and many, many more—were readily available in Australia at the turn of the century.

In 1909 an indication of American interest was the publication of a magazine devoted to the small house called the Bungalow Magazine, which began in Los Angeles and later came out of Seattle and ran to 1918.
The inimitable magazine Craftsman out of New Jersey, a popular magazine devoted to crafts revival and cottage or bungalow design, was received in Australia, but in very limited numbers.

American Architects of the Bungalow era

Two groups of American architects took the idea of the bungalow and, blended with their own idiosyncrasies, created two distinct, yet obviously related styles in the bungalow genre.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright blended Japanese modes, those of the wooden New England Shingle Style, the stark simplicity of mid-west rural buildings, and the horizontal characteristics of the bungalow. The result was an architectural style now defined as the Prairie House. (Read more: at Craftsman House)
The Prairie Houses were built almost entirely in the American mid-west— Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin—and by such architects as W. G. Purcell, George G. Elmslie, Dwight Perkins, William Drummon, Thomas Talmadge (who coined the term Chicago School and Walter Burley Griffin.
The Greene Brothers of Southern California, Charles S. and Henry M. Greene, present another idea of the bungalow.
Directly influenced by both Wright and the details of traditional Japanese architecture, they created a singular style.
The D. B. Gamble house, Pasadena, California of 1908 showed the debt to Wright more clearly than later buildings in not only detail, but formal elevational characteristics and massing.
The Greenes were seen not only in the two architectural journals but in magazines such as House Beautiful and House and Garden.

Australian Architects of the Bungalow era

The developer Richard Stanton first introduced the American style bungalow to Sydney in 1906 and by 1912 this new type of compact servantless house was being erected across Sydney by speculative builders.

- See Haberfield, the Garden Suburb

The influence of the carefully crafted Californian Bungalows can be seen in the work of architects who had worked and travelled in America, particularly Alexander Stuart Jolly and James Peddle.
The more geometric Chicago Style was introduced to Sydney by the Burley Griffins.
- By 1915 the bungalow was being promoted as the ideal home, in contrast to the terrace house form popular in the nineteenth century. (e.g. "Bring Back Bungalows")
- In the years immediately after World War I, an Australian variant of the bungalow emerged, a brick house with the characteristic series of low gables. See Beecroft Federation Heritage
In country towns a different palette of materials were used, timber or timber combined with fibrous cement sheeting.
By the 1930s the popularity of the bungalow was declining." - Scott Robertson, HHT 2012 talk

Elizabeth Farm (1793–1823) at Parramatta and the Nicholas Weston house of 1820 at Horsley, New South Wales were bungalows: so too many others of the mid-1880s.

John Horbury Hunt

In considering contemporary ideas of a bungalow's purpose and form, the first to be built in Australia was the Piddington Bungalow at Mount Victoria in 1876,designed by John Horbury Hunt. It was one of the most straightforward of Hunt's residential work. It was a long, low-profiled house in the best tradition of the bungalow.

Houses titled by their authors as bungalows were more often than not a modified or simplified Queen Anne or American Shingle Style which was based on the English forerunner.

The need to give the title 'bungalow', even if erroneous, again demonstrates the growing desirability of the type of lifestyle it evoked.

E. Jeafferson Jackson

Probably the first to recall the Horbury Hunt Shingle Style was the Henry Gullett house, Wahroonga, New South Wales, by E. Jeafferson Jackson.

Henry Gullett (1837-1914) retired as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1899 and travelled to England.
On his return, he commissioned this house from architect E. Jeaffreson Jackson. Though built as a retirement home, Gullett was coaxed out of retirement to edit the Daily Telegraph from 1901 to 1903.

The design of the house, with its shingling, arches and prominent bracketed oriel window under a large jettying gable was very influential. An almost identical design was used some years later by builder William Richards for “Mounteray”, in Burwood Road, Burwood, as part of George Hoskins’ Appian Way subdivision.

P. Oakden and C.H. Ballantyne

Two bungalows by the Melbourne architects P. Oakden and C.H. Ballantyne in 1908 provide the introduction of the twentieth-century bungalow to Australia.

The first was a one-storey house with a rather jumbled plan. The exteriors, however, were very good.
The second bungalow, for Harry Martin in Toorak, was one of the best examples of a consciously designed Australian bungalow of any period.
- It was two storeys and the floor plans were simple and direct.
- There was a modest entry to a hall which connected all rooms, an ingle-nook, a spatially open drawing and living room, and up the stairs were three bedrooms and an open upper porch or sleep-out.

James Peddle

The most frequent bungalow style was the more familiar (and popular in years to follow) Pasadena form of the Greene brothers and architect James Peddle became one of its advocates.

Peddle was attracted to the bungalow in mid-career.
To understand more fully the style and due in part to a slump in commissions, he set out for the comforts of Southern California in 1911.48
He settled in the founding home of one bungalow style, Pasadena, where he set up a practice. The area was also the location of some of the best of architects Greene and Greene houses and the worst of the builders' commercialized versions.

Kenneth Milne

Another early advocate of the bungalow was Kenneth Milne.

The Adelaide architect produced a large number of bungalow styles and near bungalows in the years just before and during World War I.
In 1906 the S. Toms house in Marryatville was completed to a design carefully blending both Voysey and the bungalow.
The Mrs J. Lee residence of a year later in Thorngate had a heavy rubble wall surrounding a linear plan, all surmounted by a large, high roof in tile.
Unique among the endeavours to create homes based on the types of bungalow was the Fairbridge Home in Perth of about 1926.

Alexander Stewart Jolly

One who was inspired by the ideas of the bungalow through both Wright and Griffin was Alexander Stewart Jolly.

The house most often referred to was Belvedere, built in 1919 for Mr F. C. Stephens at Cremorne, New South Wales, where the low profile and heavy eave line of the entry porch, as well as the bulky pylons massed about the central portion of the main body of the house indicate the more obvious elements drawn from Griffin, while the whole was of the prairie style in character.

Walter Burley Griffin

The first Australian architect to recognize the individuality of this southern continent and its new society and in the same instant, exhibit a clarity of method and style was Walter Burley Griffin.

He devised a singular style before he came to Australia and that style evolved and changed because his methodology was universal, and therefore it was adaptable to Australian conditions

In Australia the Griffins built a small house in Heidelberg, south of Melbourne.

It was the first house built using Griffin's newly devised Knitlock construction system. They called their diminutive home ‘Pholiota’
The fully open 1919 plan was directly influenced by the theoretical pure bungalow, as was the massing. Elevations were simple and unaffected.

In 1921 they moved out of their Pholiota, away from the melodrama of Federal political corridors and to the Sydney north shore: to Castlecrag.

Castlecrag was probably purchased in 1919. The final subdivision plans were completed in 1920–1.
The first house was Griffin's in 1921–2 and if we discount Pholiota, it was the first statement of an architecture inspired and derived by Australia.

Other Aussie Architects

Edwin R. Orchard built a number of bungalows in the Sydney area and most indicate a gentle blend.

The Claude Terry house of c. 1920 in Bowral, New South Wales, was a very good example, while most of his earlier designs show an uneasy quality.
It may be that those of about 1914 were his first attempts at bungalow design. He was more inclined to modified Tudor or half-timber schemes around this period and for his own residence he used the schemes now associated with Hunt, Jackson and Waterhouse.

An interesting design of 1915 showed a knowledge of the better part of bungalow planning. Donald Esplin's design for a residence in Northbridge, New South Wales, was determined by placing a billiard room in the centre, and about the periphery of the central room a series of verandahs and rooms. Restrained elevations were composed of shallow gable roofs and rather simple massing.

Keep Reading:

Federation Bungalow Style

Reference Books:

Australian Houses of the '20s, and '30s by Peter Cuffley, 1989 Five Mile Press, Fitzroy VIC
Greene & Greene, Architecture as a Fine Art, by Randell Makinson, 1977 Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City USA
The Bungalow, America's Arts and Crafts Home, by Paul Duchscherer and Douglas Keister, 1995, Penguine Studio New York NY USA.