There is much to appreciate in Janet W. Foster’s The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular. First among these is the broad focus in her celebration of American residential architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which encompasses buildings across the country in a variety of geographic and social circumstances. Foster’s celebration is amply documented in the high graphic quality of this publication, particularly in the many full-page color photographs by Radek Kurzaj that lavishly present all of the twenty-two properties chosen for the catalogue portion of her project.

One of the virtues of the photographs, and of the book more generally, is that they provide the reader with the unusual feeling that these buildings are actually used, and have been since their original construction. As might be expected, many of the houses are presented in seemingly pristine condition and in beautiful light. But the best houses in the best of all possible worlds are not all that is presented to the reader: the conventional, judicious editing of owners’ furnishings is not startlingly evident (although this certainly took place), and scratches in woodwork are visible in a number of the images. Moreover, the patina of age is foregrounded through such details as unpolished doorknobs and by the evident texture of multiple layers of paint on a porch column or even peeling paint on a barge board or window mullions. In the same “honest” vein, Colonial Revival porches and Arts and Crafts alterations are not hidden from the reader. Although not all of the buildings included among the twenty-two remain private residences (four are identified in Foster’s accompanying descriptions as house museums, two provide overnight accommodation, and one each is in institutional and commercial use, respectively), these are nonetheless real houses that have seen occupation and good use over more than one hundred years. One would expect no less from Foster as an experienced historic preservation professional and educator, but her presentation is still gratifying.

Foster’s catalogue, fronted by a substantive introduction, presents her subject in a series of five circumstances. “Summer,” “suburban,” and “urban” houses represent developments related to life in large American cities, specifically New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. These sections are followed by “rural” dwellings and “houses in town,” corresponding to buildings found in agricultural areas and smaller urban centers, respectively. Foster’s geographic range is broad. In addition to those locations already noted, she includes properties in Galveston, Texas; Eugene, Oregon; Sabin, Minnesota; and Abbeville, Louisiana. The repetition of decorative architectural details found through the photographs bolsters Foster’s assertion of the Queen Anne as a national style that crossed economic strata, state lines, and building scales and plans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The descriptions that accompany these photographs animate the houses shown in Kurzaj’s elegant photography. They offer a wealth of detail about the individual properties, builders, architects, and owners, as well as vignettes about the materials used in creating them and the technological and manufacturing accomplishments they represent. All of this provides the reader with a strong sense of the lives of those who built and have inhabited the houses selected.

Foster’s introduction offers much material that is useful: an emphasis on pattern books and other period publications, for example, as wells as good summaries, both on building technology and materials used in domestic buildings of the period and on the British design trends that influenced the decoration of American houses. One is, however, tempted to say that the lady protests too much in her repeated insistence on the existence of an identifiable Queen Anne style. This insistence begs the problematic question of what is “style” itself, but she never directly addresses this matter. Foster frequently lumps what is sometimes inappropriate under the umbrella of her title, having refuted the “tendency to consider all the rich variety of revival styles, emerging from the Romantic movement in the arts, as ‘Victorian’” (11). Her umbrella becomes noticeably too large where she conflates, at several points, matters of style with those of construction, such as innovations in plumbing and electric lighting and increasing openness of plan. It should also be said that sometimes Foster’s umbrella is too small. Her rejection of anything other than a free-standing dwelling as Queen Anne is mystifying, since semi-detached and row-house examples could easily have been included, despite her assertion that they were not numerous (139). In a number of other instances, her presentation (if not her understanding) of historic context is at best misleading and does not serve her readers. Because of this, small errors jar more than they ought.

Her headpiece (37) for the section on summer houses, the first in the catalogue section of the book, rightly focuses on Newport, Rhode Island, and H. H. Richardson’s pre-Centennial Shavian salvo, the Watts Sherman House. It is a pleasure to see this oft-recognized building presented here in its current, altered state instead of through the original perspective drawings. Foster continues with two other Newport houses: one by an architect, the Charles Baldwin house by Potter & Robinson, and one by builders, Castle Hill, by Thomas & George Shaw. Rather astonishingly, Foster implies that the Queen Anne was something like a local style based on the Watts Sherman house’s site, despite the national reach of the architectural press in which it was published and the international influence of the work of the architect Richard Norman Shaw on which much of Richardson’s project was based.

Also positioned in this first section of the book are two houses outside of Newport: the Theodore Roosevelt House in Sagamore Hill, New York, by Lamb & Rich, and the Edward Brooke House in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, by Furness, Evans & Co. (Foster names only Frank Furness as the architect, although she does mention his partnerships.) The Brooke House sits uneasily under the rubric of summer houses, however, since it was truly not one, as Foster half admits, while Birdsboro was certainly never anything like a summer resort. The placement of the Brooke House is not the only instance of Foster’s categories breaking down within her catalogue sections. Indeed, her categories seem a somewhat simplistic system of organization aimed at a popular (and therefore relatively uninitiated) readership, as they do not wholly accommodate Foster’s half-articulated, underlying agendas. It might have been better to simply identify what the reader eventually infers: the first section is intended to introduce leading and mature examples of her subject, as well as to present buildings created by professional designers and builders. Similar subtexts could be explored for the sections that follow.

The suburban houses that follow the section on summer houses represent settings as diverse as planned communities (e.g., Montrose Park, in northern New Jersey), railroad suburbs (e.g., Oak Park, Illinois), and less affluent satellites in the orbit of large metropolitan centers (e.g., Madison, New Jersey). Yet just as the Brooke house is oddly placed in its geographic section, the William E. Conover House in Greenwich, Connecticut, seems a stretch as a suburban residence in its own time, despite the noted access to northeast rail-lines via an “easy carriage drive” (131). In contrast to this awkward moment, Foster is to be commended for placing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Parker House in Oak Park in this section and thus in the context of its contemporaries.

The range of scale, richness of decoration, and relationship to the plan types of earlier American houses continues in the buildings presented in the final three sections of the catalogue. Having dismissed attached buildings as part of the definition of her main subject, her few free-standing examples seem to have little to do with their immediate surroundings, since they closely resemble the houses shown in other circumstances in materials, plan, and decorative detail. Her celebration of rural examples, however, which rarely get much attention in publications such as this, is laudable. The final section, “Houses in Town,” crescendos with the bravura woodwork display of the remarkable 1888 Milton J. Carson house in Eureka, California—a counterfoil to the better-known “Stick”-style house of his father across the street—and in the Piatt House in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, which, on the outside, is a riot of protruding secondary volumes (dormers, porches, portes-cocheres, and turrets) that seem to threaten—like a cell in the process of division—to break off and form other houses elsewhere. In her introit, Foster draws a comparison between the Queen Anne house and an exuberant John Philip Souza march, a comparison borne out by these final houses in the publication.

In her presentation of the Queen Anne style, Foster is following in the footsteps of authors who have published “field guides” on American domestic architecture. A false analogy underlies these guides: like plant or animal species, architecture may be classified by outwardly identifiable traits. This analogy is not too strained by high-style Greek-Revival dwellings built as a single, gabled volume with columns on the front, but things get awfully messy in the period that is Foster’s subject. Of course, unlike goldfinches, which invariably appear in virtually the same form from specimen to specimen, American houses within the same purported style invariably do not, particularly the houses that are the subject of this publication. More important, the species analogy suggests a rigidity and uniformity within architectural decoration that was not borne out by practice, as Foster’s catalogue section amply demonstrates. In her introduction, she embraces the variety within design of the period, including variations in building plan and elevation, and rightly points to the importance of the picturesque in informing the work she shows; yet throughout her writing she also repeatedly insists on the single-species classification.

An informed scholar will discover by an examination of Foster’s bibliography that the primary windmill at which she tilts is Vincent Scully’s seminal Shingle Style and the Stick Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). Foster endeavors to insert the Queen Anne as a third term situated between Scully’s two labels. Nevertheless, she does not address Scully’s formulation directly, nor does she identify the shingle style and the stick style clearly for her reader—a salient omission for her general audience. In fact, her work seems intended as a refutation in many ways of Scully’s formulation, and there is certainly much in Scully’s work with which one could, and should, contend. But in contrast to Scully’s clear definition of the styles as he saw them, and the narrative of progress that accompanied this, one has to struggle to find anything so lucid in Foster’s book. To be charitable, her lack of a clear opening definition may itself be an attempt to counter both Scully’s methodology and the field guide “problem,” but the net result is that a cohesive understanding of the Queen Anne style feels like a moving target. The reader eventually finds a visual glossary at the very end of the book and crumbs of allusions to many typical details here and there. Foster notes along the way that the style was “vernacular” (by which, perhaps, she means popular in several senses) and that it was hated by the East Coast academic architectural establishment (whoever they were in addition to critic Montgomery Schuyler). She also notes that the style had a number of attributes gleaned from disparate sources, including the work of English architects, pattern books, classicizing roots, and technological improvements.

This is a book squarely and generally well-aimed at an “amateur” audience in the best and classic sense of the word: a knowledgeable and interested, but not primarily academic, readership. As such, the book cannot be described as a major contribution to the scholarship of American architecture of the period. There is much to appreciate in Foster’s presentation of late nineteenth-century American houses, but her introductory formulations are, on balance, disappointing. It is a near miss: when Foster’s observations are anchored in the materiality of individual properties in her catalogue, and balanced by the visual material of Kurzaj’s photographs, they are stronger than when she attempts to make broad assertions about her subject via text alone.