Eastlake

The Eastlake Style (or Movement), where to begin? Perhaps with the man whose name is ascribed to the style, from which he sought to be disassociated. Confusing?

Charles Locke Eastlake (1836 - 1906) was a British architect and furniture designer, author of the wildly popular Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, published in the U.S. in 1872. He was a reformist, who believed in a simple and single cohesive style, opposed to the excesses of the Italianate and Second Empire styles. (Ironically and contrary to his credo, the style that came to bear his name was often quite elaborate and eclectic.)

Eastlake is one of the architectural styles of the mid-late Victorian period, along with Queen Anne and Stick. Often it's difficult to draw any precise lines between these largely concurrent building types; in fact, the style goes unrecognized by many leading architectural guidebooks, examples swept into the Queen Anne or Folk Victorian categories.

The style is asymmetrical, often with diagonal corner towers, and polygonal bays. (See photos, with diagonal bays stretched into miniature towers.) Some towers feature large finials. Ridge cresting or decorative ridge flashing is also a trademark, as are intricately pierced bargeboards.

Fashion never changes abruptly, beginning or ending on certain days; and, in the West and in Los Angeles, the Victorian styles maintained prominence longer, more immune to the architectural revolutions of the 1890's and the increasingly fashionable Richardsonian Romanesque, Shingle, and Colonial American forms.

Much of Los Angeles' 19th century housing stock is located in neighborhoods wherein losses to indifference are on-going, and apparently beneath the notice of the culture capos, focused on trophy buildings, the Jet age, and places movie stars live.