Four Squares

~ Laura

For most of last year, Steve and I searched around for a house we could afford. Mostly we looked at Cape Cods, and even grew sentimental about housing developments of the 50s.

Because we weren’t picky about living a block away from railroad tracks or being spitting distance from our neighbors, we ended up with something far grander. It’s a four square. The basic definition:

The foursquare is typically a two-and-a-half-story house on a full basement, with a monitor dormer (a dormer with a roof-line that mirrors the primary roof) in the attic. Most foursquares have pyramidal hip roofs (which come to a peak in the center). Front porches span the full width of the house, with two, three or four simple columns supporting the porch roof.

Perhaps most notably, the foursquare is a nearly square house with square shaped interior rooms. The first floor typically has four rooms, including an entry foyer or reception hall, living room, dining room and kitchen. Upstairs, three bedrooms and a bath all politely sit in their own corners.

There is some variation. Ours has two sets of gabled windows. Many in our area are made from river rocks, even the columns on the porch, which is typical of the Hudson River style. Since these homes were related to Arts and Crafts movement, there is usually a lot of detail work inside. We have two oak columns in the living room and thin, oak plank floors.

Sometimes you have to dig through years of “modernization” to find the real stuff. After ripping down wood paneling and two layers of wallpaper, we came to the original plaster, which is as strong and cool as Italian marble.

These Four Squares went up during the turn of the century in towns across America. The new middle class enhabited them, even purchasing them from the Sears Catalog. As the Progressive movement swept the country with its vision of science and progress, these efficient, practical homes reflected the times.

During our forays off Route 80 last week, we found these homes boarded up and forgotten in Pennsylvania towns that no longer have industry or rail travel to support the economy. We wanted to take home these forgotten puppies and clean them up.

When in Cleveland, we visited Ross, a friend of Steve’s who owns an art gallery. He lives in a Four Square in Lakewood, an inner ring suburb of Cleveland. The homes there are being renovated by professors and artists, who appreciate the high ceilings and dark moldings. With Ross’s paintings and Italian furniture, the interior looks remarkably modern.

The Four Square, the Colonial, the Ranch, the Cape Cod, the Bilevel. These homes for the masses are becoming a new obsession. Anybody have any book suggestions?

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Four Squares”

  1. Well, just for home living in general, Sarah Susanka’s “Not So Big House” series is pretty remarkeable. It’s also good for apartment living – or probably more so since you usually have less space to work with.

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  3. Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” is an interesting analysis of how the uses of buildings change over time, mixed with the constants that we all tend to gravitate to (like having windows on two sides of a room, as your lovely four sqare likely does). It also discusses many types of architecture, both historic and modern. This book owes much to “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, but it has more pictures and is a much more fun read.

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  4. Wow! I totally have this house, in Lakewood! I wonder how near your friend I live? My sister in law has this same house on the east side of Cleveland — exactly the same as mine but she has a double staircase (envy!) and I don’t.
    Thanks for the name, though, ‘four square’ — I have to go correct myself on my own blog. I’ve been calling it a colonial.

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  5. Bungalow Kitchens and Bungalow Bathrooms (two books), by Jane Powell and Linda Svendsen. Perhaps not quite the styles or periods you’re looking at (nor that I’m looking at), but written and photographed from a really interesting point of view. More of the pictures are of big fancy houses than might be, I think just because those are more likely to be preserved and open to the public, but there’s a real focus on how houses got built the way that they did, how they were lived in and can still be lived in, etc.
    It’s also, I think, very helpful to use style vocabulary accurately; thank you! Where I live, there are two kinds of houses in real estate ads: ranch (one story) and colonial (more than one story). Really.

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  6. We are restoring an old house we believe to be built around the 1890’s. I am fairly certain it is a four square, but it is only one and a half levels with a very obvious addition. The first floor is nearly identical to all of the second floor plans I’ve seen. We are thinking it is a “modified four square”, maybe down graded to something they could afford, however I can not find any pictures of anyone else’s single level four square. Do you have any insight?

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  9. We just moved to Denver and bought a “Denver Square” – the same thing as a four square, a prairie-box, and an American four-square.
    Ours is actually a (ahem) doublewide (a term coined by my husband)- a valid, though less seen, version with the door in the middle of the front rather than on one side or the other. The house is then mirrored across the middle, so there are still the four mostly-square rooms per floor, but around a central stair spine.
    In any case, I’ve seen a lot of what look like one and a half-story foursquares here in Denver- mostly in the neighborhood just to the north of City Park (so between York and Colorado and north of about 28th). If I hadn’t seen them, I wouldn’t believe they exist! 🙂 hope that helps with research!

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