Queen Anne Victorian Cottage

The Queen Anne style of architecture is easily recognized with its crossed gables, turrets or cupolas, wrap-around porches and porticos. It is called a cottage because of its smaller size. During the Victorian period in Texas, roughly 1870 to 1905, the architecture tended to be ornate. The use of multiple textures and patterns was meant to break the monotony of sameness and create a feeling of expanded height and size. This house, built around 1885, was originally located in Gainesville and was relocated to the Historical Park in 1992 with restoration completed in 1996.

What's in a Name?

Queen Anne was the most popular type of late Victorian domestic architecture and is perhaps the most inaccurately named of such styles. After all, Queen Anne's reign dates from 1702 to 1714, but it is the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign from 1860 to 1900 that are generally known as "Victorian." The Queen Anne style was introduced to the United States during the 1876 Centennial celebrations and quickly spread throughout the country. Americans copied some of the concepts but added their own flair.

Origins of the Cottage

The Queen Anne Victorian Cottage was originally built in 1885 at 501 West Broadway in Gainesville, Texas, and is architecturally typical of small cottages built during the late Victorian era in Texas. By 1907, it was occupied by the Basinger family and their descendants, who lived in the home until it was moved to the Historical Park in April 1992. It was restored to its 1885 appearance, dedicated and opened for tours in 1997.

Farmers Branch was a rural farming community in the 1880s and 1890s, so is unlikely that a Queen Anne Victorian Cottage was built here. This type of architecture is representative of homes built in more commercial towns across North Texas during the 1880s, like Gainesville. Farmers Branch residents were probably familiar with Victorian homes, as many were built in nearby Carrollton and Dallas.

Design & Furnishings

Victorians enjoyed the elegant and conspicuous display of wealth through bold colors and designs on walls and ceilings. The papers in the cottage were manufactured in the way that the original wallpapers in the house would have been produced – by a hand-screening process. The wallpapers that currently hang in the Basingers' home are grander than what the Basingers originally had. We keep remnants of the original wallpaper in collections storage. They are more muted and less fanciful in design than those on the walls.

Many pieces of furniture selected for this Victorian Cottage are of Eastlake "inspired" style characterized by straight lines and geometric incised designs. This style gets its name from Charles Eastlake (1836-1906), an English architect and writer who had a great impact on the trends of the time. Eastlake stressed simplicity in construction and design, advocating furniture constructed in a box-like fashion from sturdy oak, embellished with simple geometric designs. American renderings of Eastlake-style furniture are most accurately called "Eastlake-inspired." American craftsmen created variants of Eastlake's intentions, working in dark walnut and burl panels using many of the fancy features Eastlake disdained. The window, door frames and casings in the Victorian Cottage are in the Eastlake style.