How to tell what era and style a Central Ohio house is

Ohio's own survey form asks two questions about a house where most guides ask one: what type it is, and what style is on it. This page is a field guide built on the state's answers, on the National Park Service's element-by-element method for reading a building, and on the Franklin County Auditor's style codes counted by decade built. Every date range is one the state printed; every county figure names the record and its download date.

Last updated September 2026 · The Ohio Historic Preservation Office's inventory manual and Ohio Modern report, National Park Service preservation briefs and the Franklin County Auditor's 2026-08-15 appraisal extract were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

Two lists, not one

Ohio's state historic preservation office, housed at the Ohio History Connection, says its statewide survey began with the Ohio Historic Inventory in 1973 and has documented more than 100,000 architectural properties since. The guidance for the form is a book the office still posts: How to Complete the Ohio Historic Inventory, by Stephen C. Gordon, Columbus, 1992.

The form asks two questions where most guides ask one. Item 18 is Style or Design; item 21 is Building Type or Plan; each has its own printed list. The manual says plainly that type is not determined by style: several buildings of one type may each be of a different style, and one building may carry elements of several.

A type, it says, is identified by overall massing, floor plan, shape, number and arrangement of bays and chimney location; a second, fuller definition elsewhere in the manual defines it instead by function, floor plan, configuration, number of stories, chimney location, roof configuration and window and door arrangements. Size, materials and stylistic features often change, it notes, while the basic form usually remains constant. That a type outlasts a remodel and predicts the plan is this page's inference from that sentence, not the manual's claim. Where no academic style is present, a surveyor enters vernacular and records the type anyway.

Read it element by element, the way the Park Service does

The method here is the National Park Service's, from Preservation Brief 17 on architectural character, which defines character as all those visual aspects and physical features that make up the appearance of a building: its overall shape, materials, craftsmanship, decorative details, interior spaces and features, and its site and environment.

Its method is three steps: examine the building from afar for its overall setting and architectural context, then move up very close for its materials and craftsmanship, then go through it for the spaces and details of its interior character. Step one asks seven questions in order: shape; roof and roof features; openings; projections; trim and secondary features; materials; setting. That approach works, the brief says, without resorting to an infinitely long checklist of possible features and details, which is what most style guides are. Ohio's own survey software records those same elements field by field, from stories and window type to foundation material, roof type, bays, symmetry and chimney placement, and grades how strongly each style is present. That both documents look at the same things is this page's comparison, not a statement either publisher makes.

The types, in the state's own words

The types on the form run from Single Pen and Hall and Parlor through the I House, Gabled Ell and Upright and Wing to the American Foursquare, the Bungalow, the Cape Cod Cottage, the Ranch and the Split-Level. The last five are the ones this page takes up.

American Foursquare, about 1900 to 1925. Two to two and one-half stories, a nearly square floor plan and a blocky shape under a low pyramidal hipped roof, the basement slightly raised so steps reach a three- or four-post porch across the front. The manual also says where the bathroom is: the second floor usually has four corner rooms with a central hall and the bathroom between two of them.

Bungalow, about 1905 to 1930 as a type. Ohio has two basic subtypes, the manual says, the Dormer Front and the Gable Front. The Dormer Front is one-and-one-half or two stories with side-facing gables, a full-width inset porch and a front-facing gabled or shed dormer, bedrooms often on both floors.

Cape Cod Cottage, about 1925 to 1950, which the manual also calls the Williamsburg Colonial and the most common form of the one-and-one-half-story Colonial Revival house of those years. The tells are that massing, a steeply pitched side-facing gable roof and a symmetrical three- or five-bay front with dormers. It makes no claim about where a Cape Cod's bathroom sits, and says why: interior plans vary greatly among the several forms of this type.

Ranch, about 1940 to 1970. The manual describes a single-story dwelling with a low-pitched roof and a rectilinear or elongated shape, its rambling plan a large living room flanked by bedrooms and by the kitchen and dining room. Garages are often attached at the kitchen end, and the houses are commonly faced in brick, wood or stone, with picture windows, low chimneys and minimal front porches. Around 1960, it adds, sliding glass doors and rear patios became popular. Which Ohio plants made those facings is on what Ohio made for houses.

Split-Level, about 1950 to 1980, which the manual also calls the Tri-Level and says emerged along with the Ranch. Its plan is the one a homeowner walks into: a landing inside the front door, steps up to the living, dining and kitchen level, bedrooms a half-story higher at the other end, the family and utility rooms a half-story lower and partly below grade. What that last part means for water is on the page about what goes wrong in a Central Ohio house.

What the state's list does not carry

The type list stops at the Split-Level. It has no bi-level, no minimal traditional and no name at all for the two-story house of the 1980s and 1990s. The manual was published in 1992, so nothing built since has a name on the form. Minimal traditional is a field guide's word, used by neither the state's survey nor the county's record.

The postwar types, in the state's Ohio Modern report

The state's account of the postwar house is a separate document: Ohio Modern, the statewide historic context the Ohio Historic Preservation Office commissioned for 1940 to 1970 and published on September 7, 2010, prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc. It calls the Cape Cod the first recent past housing type to be seen in large numbers, and describes the 1940s version as typically one or one-and-one-half stories of about 800 square feet holding a living room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. The manual starts that type at about 1925, from its revival; the report picks it up in the postwar boom.

Ohio Modern says the ranch house originated in California in the 1930s and became the housing type of choice throughout Ohio's suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s, giving the Ohio ranch of those decades a low-pitched hipped or side-gabled roof, a front porch often no more than a concrete stoop, and a large picture window frequently off-center.

The split-level, it says, was an adaptation of the ranch that gave more privacy, placing bedrooms on an upper level a half-story above the main living and kitchen area and directly above an all-purpose room below. And it names the type the survey form does not: the popularity of the split-level led to a house whose entryway is centered between stories, so the front door opens onto a landing halfway between floors, which the report says was also known as a split-foyer. That is the bi-level, named by an Ohio document but absent from the form.

The styles that sit on the types

The manual's style list runs from Federal, Greek Revival and Gothic Revival through Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Craftsman/Arts and Crafts and Prairie to Art Deco, International and Modern Movements. It opens with two answers that are not styles at all, Not determined and No academic style, vernacular.

Colonial Revival is the one a Central Ohio reader meets most. The manual dates it from about 1895 to the present and calls it one of the predominant architectural styles in Ohio during the first part of the twentieth century. Its common elements are a rectilinear form with facade symmetry, gable roofs with dormers, Tuscan columns or fluted pilasters, large double-hung shuttered windows, dentils below the cornice and center hall plans. Two Ohio subtypes, Georgian Revival and Dutch Colonial Revival, are treated separately.

What most people call Tudor Revival the state calls Tudor/English Revival, dated about 1910 to 1940: steeply pitched, usually side-gabled roofs; rough-sawn half-timbering almost always above the first story; narrow multipaned grouped casement windows, some with leaded glass; Tudor arches; and prominent chimneys. After the First World War, the manual adds, speculative builders in Ohio put up many small one-and-one-half-story Tudor Revival houses on small suburban lots.

The word that proves the point sits on both lists. Bungalow is a style in the manual, dated about 1910 to 1935, with exposed roof beams and rafter tails, battered or square porch posts and a long living room across the front. It is also a house type, dated about 1905 to 1930. One book, two lists, two date ranges, carried here rather than resolved. Entire streets such as East Longview in Columbus, the manual says, reflect the popularity of Bungalow architecture.

What a window can and cannot tell you

A window sequence circulates: certain sash before the 1920s, others between the wars, picture windows and sliders after them. No source read for this page states it, and the one federal document that might have declines to. The National Park Service's Preservation Brief 9 on wooden windows says only that many styles of vertical sliding sash have come to be associated with specific building periods or architectural styles, and then that the comparison should be made on a site-specific, regionally oriented basis. It publishes no sequence of sash types by decade, so the sequence is unsupported and this page stops there.

Ohio's manual prints light counts as vocabulary rather than as a date series, naming double-hung sash by their lights from one over one to twelve over twelve, giving a homeowner the word rather than the year. The dated window statements that do exist are tied to a type: the grouped casements on Tudor/English Revival in Ohio, and the off-center picture window on the 1950s and 1960s Ohio ranch. What the National Park Service says about the wooden sash and the steel window is on the page on windows and glass in a Central Ohio house.

What the county calls your house

The other body that names house styles here is the Franklin County Auditor, and its record is a different kind of thing. The figures below come from its appraisal extract, the 2026-08-15 snapshot of the Outside User Files, downloaded on 2026-09-06. The universe is single-family parcels by the Auditor's own land use codes 510 to 515 with property class R, the primary dwelling card, and a recorded year built: 297,465 houses. The style there is the assessor's classification, carried for property valuation rather than as an architectural survey, and the Auditor publishes neither a date on which a code was set nor any definition of the words: its parcel file description names the field and gives no values, while enumerating every value of the condition, property type and wall codes beside it, and its label-names workbook expands the column STYLE to the single word STYLE. The words exist only inside the data, each value carrying the code and the label together, written as 05 - RANCH, as six parcels looked up by hand on the Auditor's public search confirmed.

So two public bodies name house styles in Central Ohio and their words do not line up. The Auditor's twenty-one are CONVENTIONAL, BI-LEVEL, MULTI-LEVEL, RANCH, TOWNHOUSE/ROWHOUSE, OLD STYLE, BUNGALOW, COLONIAL, CAPE COD, MODERN, CONDOMINIUM, DUPLEX, TRIPLEX, OTHER/CONVERSION, CONTEMPORARY, LOG, TUDOR, MOBILE HOME SINGLE, MOBILE HOME DOUBLE, CABIN/COTTAGE and ARCHITECTURAL. Setting them beside the state's two lists is this page's own observation, not a statement either body makes: seven of them, CONVENTIONAL, OLD STYLE, MULTI-LEVEL, BI-LEVEL, MODERN, CONTEMPORARY and ARCHITECTURAL, appear on neither state list, and four state types, American Foursquare, I House, Gabled Ell and Upright and Wing, have no county equivalent. The county's word MODERN is not on the state's list; the state's carries Modern Movements and Art Moderne, which are not the same thing.

Conventional is the Auditor's catch-all rather than a style. It sits on single-family houses in all fourteen decade groups, with a year built from 1800 to 2025, and is the most common code in the field; Old Style spans the same range and ranks sixth. Measured inside the same records, and stated by the Auditor nowhere, 98.44 percent of Conventional-coded houses carry its two-story code and 99.99 percent of Ranch-coded houses carry its one-story code. A house the Auditor codes CONVENTIONAL may be a foursquare, an I House or a 1990s two-story, and the record does not say which. The last row is six years, not ten.

One suburban figure is a fact of the record and nothing more. In Upper Arlington the code 11, Modern, leads houses built in the 1920s at 68.75 percent, 385 of 560, and 385 of the county's 389 such houses sit in that suburb. Why the code was applied there and almost nowhere else is outside this record.

What the decade means for the rest of the house

The decade a house was built brackets a bathroom project better than the style name does, and each question it raises has a page of its own: what was built when, on house styles by era; the walls, on how these houses were built; what Ohio's plants supplied, on what Ohio made for houses; the incidents behind the rules, on fires, floods and collapses; the bathroom, on the bathroom page; how many of them, on bathrooms per house; the pipes, on supply pipes by era; the wiring, on bathroom electrical; the floors, on floors and subfloors; and the pre-1978 line, on lead paint and asbestos.

Where the bathroom sits, where a source says so

Only three documents read for this page put a bathroom in a plan. Ohio's manual places the foursquare's, between two of the four corner rooms upstairs. The state's Ohio Modern report places one in the Cape Cods built in Hanford Village in Columbus in the mid-1940s, where each home included five finished rooms on the first floor: living room, dinette and kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms, with unfinished space above. That is one development, not a rule. And nationally, National Register Bulletin 46 puts two bedrooms and a bathroom off a small hallway at the back of the 1936 Federal Housing Administration plan the industry came to call the minimum house.

For the ranch and the split-level, nothing found for this page places the bathroom at all; Ohio Modern gives the split-level's upper level to the bedrooms and names no bathroom. The type tells you the plan a house started from. It does not tell you what has been done to that plan since, and neither does the county's code.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• Ohio History Connection, State Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historic Inventory - History/Architecture Survey and the Ohio Historic Inventory, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society, Stephen C. Gordon, How to Complete the Ohio Historic Inventory (Columbus, 1992), 1992; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services, Preservation Brief 17: Architectural Character - Identifying the Visual Aspects of Historic Buildings as an Aid to Preserving Their Character, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Historic Preservation Office, Ohio History Connection, Guidelines for Conducting History/Architecture Surveys in Ohio, Revised 2014, 2014; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society (prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc.), Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past - Statewide Historic Context, Chapter 4, Design Trends in Ohio, 1940-1970, September 7, 2010; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society (prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc.), Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past - Statewide Historic Context, Introduction (title page and project data), September 7, 2010; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services, Preservation Brief 9: The Repair of Historic Wooden Windows, undated; read September 2026.
• Franklin County Auditor, Outside User Files: 2026-08-15 Appraisal, Tab-Delimited (Parcel.txt and Dwelling.txt), August 15, 2026; read September 2026.
• Franklin County Auditor, Parcel CSV - Description of Fields, undated; read September 2026.
• Franklin County Auditor, Appraisal Outside User File - Label Names (workbook), undated; read September 2026.
• Franklin County Auditor, Property Search: Parcel ID search, Residential building report, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society (prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc.), Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past - Statewide Historic Context, Chapter 3, Historic Context, September 7, 2010; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register Bulletin 46, Historic Residential Suburbs: Guidelines for Evaluation and Documentation for the National Register of Historic Places, part 1, 2002; read September 2026.

Common questions