Stick Style Homes in Massachusetts

What is a Stick Style house?

Stick Style is a Victorian house from the 1860s through the 1880s, and it wears its bones on the outside. Flat wooden boards run across the walls in patterns, dividing the surface into panels to hint at the wooden frame hidden inside, as if you could read the skeleton of the house from the sidewalk. People call those boards the “sticks.” It sits between two Victorian moments, growing out of the steep-gabled Gothic Revival look and leading into the lighter Queen Anne.

Why it’s special

The whole house is an honest little argument about how it was built. Instead of hiding the frame behind smooth siding, the builder traced it onto the walls with trim, and the braces in the gable peaks look like they are holding the roof up. None of it is structural, but it tells a story. These houses are tall and lively: steep gables, wide eaves, tall narrow windows grouped together, and a deep porch wrapping the front and one side. The color was meant to be dark and rich, brown, olive green, deep red, so a Stick Style house painted white has lost half its character.

What it’s like to live in one

These are warm, characterful Victorians with big porches and good light. In Massachusetts they are genuinely rare, so where you find one matters. Worcester and Pittsfield have the most, usually a mill owner’s or merchant’s fancy house from the 1870s and 80s. Cape Cod has a handful of summer cottages at Falmouth Heights and Onset, and the Boston streetcar suburbs, Brookline, Newton, and Cambridge, each hide one or two. Going in, budget for updated heating and wiring and for keeping all that exterior woodwork sound, since the trim is the whole point.

Is it the real thing?

The sticks trace the frame of the house itself. Tudor Revival houses also show wood trim, but that trim imitates old English half-timbering, and those houses came later, from the 1890s onward. If the woodwork looks like a diagram of the frame, you are probably looking at Stick Style. Because real examples are so uncommon here, a documented one is worth a close look. For a classification we lean on a historic-survey record (MACRIS) or a clear style mention, paired with a build date in the 1860 to 1890 window.