With Arts & Crafts homes, it is often the way the details are combined, both inside and out, that makes a house an authentic Arts and Crafts bungalow.

In Bungalow Details: Interior, the follow-up to the popular Bungalow Details: Exterior, Jane Powell and Linda Svendsen go inside the bungalow, to identify and explain the wonderful details that make a bungalow authentic, from wood floor to beamed ceiling! The authors skillfully explain how to identify the details and the ways of blending them, and offer insight into the Arts & Crafts philosophy behind their use. With Bungalow Details, however, anyone can become a bungalow expert.

Excerpt:
Bungalows by and large are laid out informally, with rooms often opening into one another for the illusion of more space and a minimum of hallways. Though there is no typical plan, a lot of bungalows, especially on narrow city lots, have the living room, dining room, and kitchen on one side and the bedrooms and bath(s) on the other. Though many bungalows have entry halls, many lack them and the front door opens directly into the living room. Dining and living rooms are often open to one another, separated by an arch or colonnade, or possibly by a wide doorway with pocket or french doors, or sometimes only by half-height walls or a colonnade, adding to the illusion of spaciousness in a small house.

Dining rooms may also have doors to the front porch or to a separate porch, part of the blurring of indoors and outdoors that bungalow designers considered essential. The kitchen is usually near the dining room, although it may be separated by a butler's pantry, even in a modest bungalow where they were not likely to have had servants. Bedrooms may open directly off the living room, dining room, kitchen, or other rooms, or there may be a hallway.

In a one-and-a-half-story bungalow, the stairway to the second floor may start in the entry hall (if there is one), or in the living room or dining room. Occasionally, stairs will come up from the back of the house instead, near the kitchen. Breakfast rooms or nooks are generally off the kitchen or dining room. Other rooms, sometimes of indeterminate usage (study, library, music room, sewing room, nursery, etc.), as well as the occasional half-bath, were fitted in where space was available.

Coming directly after the Victorian period as they did, bungalows hadn't entirely lost the excessive numbers of doors to which Victorian houses were prone. In Victorian houses, doors allowed rooms to be closed off when not in use in order to save heat. Although bungalows had moved away from this custom as central heat became more common, they could still be pretty door-happy.

Kitchens especially may have three, four, or even more doors leading into them. Bathrooms may also have a lot of doors, as they were often placed between two bedrooms (sometimes known as a Jack-and-Jill bathroom), and those may have even had a third door into a hallway. A bathroom opening off a hallway may also have a door leading into one of the bedrooms.

Bungalow Details is the ultimate resource book and will show you how to incorporate these details into your home's design. Included are historical sidebars and general how-to information that will enable you to appreciate, re-create, or apply these details in planning your unique bungalow.

Excerpt
(pdf, 485 Kb)

Contact the author at hsedressng@aol.com for more information or if you want a special autographed copy.

The Author is also available for consultations.

For More Arts and Crafts books, visit Gibbs-Smith

(c) 2000, Brian Klapak.

For questions or comments on this website, contact Brian Klapak