Before the Bungalow: Claremont's Oldest House Forms

Ask most people to picture an old Claremont house and they will describe a Craftsman bungalow. Low roof, deep porch, tapered columns, exposed rafter tails.

Fair enough. That stock is abundant and it is beloved, and it gets its own treatment in the bungalow piece.

But bungalows are not the oldest thing standing. Before that era, houses in Southern California towns were built to a set of simpler, older logics, and a small number of those buildings are still out there. They are just very hard to recognise, because the ones that survived usually survived by being altered.

This is a piece about how to read them.

What the earliest houses were solving for

Not style. Shelter, cost, materials at hand, and the local climate.

Early house forms across the country share a family resemblance because they answer the same practical questions. How do you enclose the most usable space with the least material? How do you get light and air through a building before mechanical systems exist? How do you add on later when the family grows and the budget allows?

The answer, over and over, is a simple rectangular volume with a steeply or moderately pitched gable roof, one room deep or close to it, with additions attached as needed. Vernacular is the word people use for this, and it is not a euphemism for crude. These are efficient, sensible buildings.

The recognisable early forms

The gable-front house. A rectangular box turned so the gable end faces the street, with the entry under it. It reads tall and narrow from the sidewalk. Extremely common in early town development because it suits a narrow lot.

The side-gabled cottage. The same simple volume rotated, so the long eave faces the street and the roof slopes down toward you. Often with a modest porch tucked under.

The gabled ell. Two wings meeting at a right angle, usually because the second one was added later. The porch typically sits in the crook of the L. This form is essentially a record of a family growing.

The pyramidal cottage. A square plan under a hipped roof that rises to a point. Compact and cheap to frame.

Ornament, when it exists on these, is usually applied rather than structural: turned porch posts, decorative shingles in a gable, a bracket at the eave, a bit of spindlework. Machine-made ornament shipped in and nailed on. That is the honest Victorian-era story in most small towns, as opposed to the elaborate mansions people picture.

Why they are so hard to spot

Because a plain old house is the easiest kind to remodel.

Nobody in 1955 felt guilty about enclosing a porch on a simple cottage. Nobody in 1978 hesitated to put stucco over old siding, swap the windows for aluminium, and strip the eave ornament off while they were up there.

The result is that many of the oldest buildings in any town are hiding inside later skins. The tell is almost always the ROOF, because roof form is the most expensive thing to change and therefore the last thing to go.

Look at the massing from across the street. If a house has a simple, steeply pitched volume under a later skin, and the additions read as clearly attached rather than integral, you may be looking at something considerably older than the finishes suggest.

Other tells: window openings that are taller and narrower than the era of the current windows would explain, an oddly placed front door, floor levels that step, and interior clues like wide-plank subfloor, square-cut nails, or wall framing at spacings nobody uses now.

What this means if you own one

First: do not assume. A house that looks like it might be early might be a later house built in an old-fashioned way. Age is a documented fact, not an impression, and the paper trail is the subject of researching your home's history.

Second: whether the property carries any designation or sits within any area subject to review is a question only the City of Claremont can answer for your address. Ask before you plan anything, and do not rely on what a neighbor believes.

Third: treat the roof form and the original openings as the crown jewels. Those two things are what make the building legible as what it is. Later siding and later windows may be perfectly reversible; a changed roofline is not.

Fourth: if you find original material under a later covering, photograph everything before you decide anything.

Why these houses matter

They are scarce, and scarcity is the whole story. Bungalows were built in enormous numbers. The generation before them was not, in most towns, and attrition has been working on the survivors for a very long time.

They also record something the grander architecture does not: how ordinary people actually lived when a place was still becoming itself. A three-room cottage with a lean-to kitchen tells you more about the early economy of a town than any showpiece does.

You do not need to restore one to a fixed moment to respect it. Keeping the form legible, and not removing what is left, is most of the job.

More across the whole subject in the historic homes hub, and the framework for what counts as officially historic is in what makes a home historic. Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.