Shingle Style

The Shingle Style is the South Fork's summer-colony house: a light wood frame wrapped in wood shingles, with a broad porch, a roof that does most of the composing, and windows divided into small panes. On the South Fork it dates mostly from the 1880s to the 1920s. The National Register nomination for East Hampton Village counts more than 90 houses of this type in the village alone, most of them in the Summer Colony, the southwestern half of the village historic district.

The style matters to a buyer for two reasons. It is the look most new South Fork houses imitate, so an original has to be told apart from a reproduction. And the best-documented originals sit inside historic districts, where the front of the house, the porch and often the shingles themselves are under review.

How to recognize it

• Walls. Wood shingle over most or all of the house. The Montauk Association houses have a clapboard first story with shingles above, often in diamond, fish-scale, saw-tooth and staggered patterns. The Bluff Road cottages in Amagansett are all natural, unpainted shingle.
• Roofs. Gambrel and gable roofs, cross gables, eyebrow and other dormers, eaves at different heights. In East Hampton Village, I.H. Green's 1887 Herrick House and 1888 Munroe House on Ocean Avenue used gambrel roofs to bring a large two-story mass down to an informal scale. The nomination says both were widely imitated across the Summer Colony.
• Porches. Wide front porches, often wrapping a corner, sometimes with upper-story sleeping porches. Posts are turned, boxed, shingled or plain classical columns.
• Windows. Multi-pane and diamond-pane sash, "Queen Anne sash" (one large pane ringed by small ones), Palladian and stair-hall windows, triple-hung windows opening to porches.
• Chimneys. Tall, corbelled brick chimneys, each treated differently.
• Plan. Asymmetrical and informal, turned toward the view and the breeze rather than the street. On Bluff Road every cottage faces south to the ocean.

Many South Fork examples mix in Queen Anne towers or later Colonial Revival details (Palladian windows, Tuscan porch columns). The surveys describe these as "Queen Anne/Shingle" or "Shingle/Colonial Revival" for that reason.

Where it concentrates

• East Hampton Village. The Summer Colony section of the expanded village historic district, laid out for big summer houses between 1885 and 1910. Architects named in the nomination include I.H. Green, Cyrus Eidlitz, J.G. Thorp, J.C. Lawrence and William B. Tuthill, with local builder-architects such as George A. Eldredge. Shingle houses were still being built in the village in 1927–1928.
• Montauk. The Montauk Association Historic District: seven houses built 1882–1884 and a clubhouse (burned 1933), all by McKim, Mead & White, sited on a Frederick Law Olmsted plan. The Town's guidelines describe them as early, restrained work in the style.
• Amagansett. The Bluff Road Historic District: fourteen summer cottages built 1892–1915 along the bluff above the Atlantic Double Dunes.
• Shinnecock Hills. The Town of Southampton survey identifies a cluster of Shingle and Arts & Crafts houses tied to the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, including the William Merritt Chase Homestead and several houses by Grosvenor Atterbury.
• Water Mill and Bridgehampton. Scattered Queen Anne/Shingle houses in the Town survey, including Rosemary Lodge (1884, Frederick W. Stickney), which is State and National Register listed.
• Southampton Village. The Village's own guide describes celebrated summer houses in late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century styles within its historic districts.

Documented examples

• Montauk Association houses (Agnew, Benson, Sanger, Hoyt, Andrews, de Forest and Orr houses). National Register listed in 1976. The Orr House burned in 1997 and was rebuilt in 2000 from documentary and physical evidence; the Town treats it as historic.
• William Merritt Chase Homestead, Shinnecock Hills. State and National Register listed. Shingle-clad, gambrel-roofed, with a Doric-columned porch. The survey says Stanford White is generally accepted to have made sketches for it.
• Everett Herrick House (1887) and George Munroe House (1888), Ocean Avenue, East Hampton Village. Both by I.H. Green; named in the village nomination as representative.
• Alfred Swayne House ("Algoma"), Shinnecock Hills. Built for financier Alfred Swayne between about 1900 and 1905; the survey describes it as Shingle style by Grosvenor Atterbury.
• Rosemary Lodge, Water Mill. Designed 1884 by Frederick W. Stickney; State and National Register listed.

Renovation and historic review

A Certificate of Appropriateness is a written approval from the local preservation board, required before a building permit for exterior work on a designated landmark or a property in a local historic district. Which board issues it depends on the municipality:

• Village of East Hampton: the Design Review Board, under Chapter 176. Any change to exterior elements except normal maintenance needs a certificate. The board weighs roof slope, window proportion and arrangement, and the spacing of houses along the street.
• Town of East Hampton (Montauk, Amagansett, Springs and other hamlets): the Architectural Review Board, applying district-specific guidelines. At the Montauk Association, the guidelines bar additions to the south, east and west walls of the seven original houses and limit additions to modest north-wall wings. On Bluff Road, no addition may go on the road facade. A side addition's front elevation must be less than half the historic house's front elevation, measured as width times height. Painting or staining natural shingles requires review.
• Village of Southampton: the Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation, under Chapter 65, guided by the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation.
• Town of Southampton: the Landmarks and Historic Districts Board. Town landmark designation requires the owner's written consent. The board also reviews demolition and construction applications for any structure built before 1941, designated or not.

National Register listing by itself places no specific restrictions on a private owner's work. Local designation is what triggers review. Check both, parcel by parcel.

What the assessment roll does not tell you

The roll will not tell you a house is Shingle Style. New York's residential building-style codes include Colonial, Cape Cod, Old Style, Cottage, Mansion and Contemporary, and none of them is Shingle Style. On the South Fork records the Research Desk has reviewed, the style field reads "Unknown." Style is a judgment made by looking at the house and reading its documents, not a data field.

The roll's year built is also not a construction date you can rely on. The State manual keeps separate fields for actual year built, effective year built and year remodeled. Where an assessor could not get inside, the interior is estimated from similar nearby parcels. A shingled house with a recent roll date may be an old frame that was rebuilt. A house with an old roll date may have been replaced. The designation report, the Town survey entry, historic maps and the building permit file are better evidence.

Related: Colonial Revival, New Traditional, all style guides.