By James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell

The acknowledged master of the 20th-century Cape Cod house was Royal Barry Wills, who found in the common dwellings of his native New England both an ideal model for an attractive, efficient small house and a vehicle for propelling his practice. Starting in commercial work in the 1920s, he concentrated on residential design after his winning entry in the Better Homes in America Small House Competition brought him national attention in 1932. With a knack for explaining housebuilding to the layman through light-hearted prose and illustrations, by the 1940s Wills enjoyed a second career as author and architectural sage in the popular press. Though no less adept at designing houses in the International/Modern idiom, it was Wills's gift for Cape Cods that set the standard. Illustration Courtesy of Gordon Bock

Yes, of course, vouch the real estate people in almost any community, it's a Cape Cod. Certainly the Cape CodÑboth the New England original and the mid-20th-century revivalÑis one of the most popular house types ever. But are those homes-for-sale ads always right? What is it that distinguishes a genuine Cape Cod from classified listing hype?

For generations the buying public has admired the Cape's picturesque, small-cottage scale and its straightforward simplicity. In its revival forms, it has retained its popularity far beyond the peak years from around 1940 through the post-World War II building boom. Curiously, the Cape Cod was one of the last house types of the American colonial era to be revived, despite its beguiling form and idealized reflection of a simpler past. Although the Colonial Revival was well underway in the 1890s, becoming the predominant style after World War I, architects and builders alike overlooked this little gem until the late 1920s, when a few Cape Cod designs made it into pattern books. Perhaps the small, winsomely plain house was an answer to building needs during the Great Depression, as the nation downsized its houses. Yet the southern equivalent-the hall-and-parlor Virginia colonialÑfound favor with the public in the early 1920s even before the Depression.

Humble Models
Despite its good repute, the original Cape Cod was little noted by early students of the colonial period, and the first book on the subject didn't appear until Alfred Easton Poor's Colonial Architecture of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard in 1932. The original Cape Cods were small cottages of 1 or 1 1/2 storeys, with steep gable roofs but devoid of dormer windows. Exterior walls were usually shingled and left unpainted, but sometimes had painted clapboards on the front. Originals almost always featured a very large central chimney. The houses varied extensively in width, from a full or double Cape (either term indicating there was a central door flanked by two windows), to a half or single Cape (with a door at one side and two windows only), to a three-quarter or one-and-a-half Cape (with a door flanked on one side by one window and on the other by two windows). Yes, the double nomenclature is confusing, but architectural historians have long used both systems for describing the Cape.

Doorways are plain, often with a simple transom; later perhaps a simple front-ispiece. Each side has one or several windows under the steep gable. A distinctive variation was the bowed gable, showing a gentle outward camber thought to be derived from shipbuilding. Some people consider gambrel-roof houses to be Capes, while some do not. There was generally no cornice or projecting eaves on the ends. The front windows extended close up to the roofline, a distinctive feature marking the low interior ceiling that began to change around 1800. The house is found from coastal Maine to Connecticut, although it is most frequently seen on Cape Cod itself. It dates from the early 18th century to about 1830, when Greek Revival details began to appear and the scale expanded. Sometimes the gable made the front of house, enriched with pilasters and a sidelight at the entry door.

New-Century Capes
Interest in reviving the Cape Cod blossomed quickly at the end of the 1920s, when the style began to appear in house design books such as the massive Home Builders Catalogs, in Sears Roebuck's Modern Homes readi-cut catalogs starting in 1931, and in popular home magazines. Home-design competitions throughout the 1930s broadened the market even more. The Cape Cod Revival's champion, though, was architect Royal Barry Wills of Boston, whose name became synonymous with this style and other New England regional house types.

Many architects designed Capes, but few caught the essence of their quaint charm. Wills uniquely understood the simple, picturesque appeal of these small houses, managing to include the modern necessities of heat and utilities while producing design after design that captured the preindustrial aura of the originals. He deftly incorporated side or rear wingsÑeven garagesÑso effectively that the average viewer would almost consider them historic, while never losing sight of the basic Cape form. Wills led the revival from its start until his death in 1962, and his firm continues today.

Wills had a knack for publicity, writing widely read articles, entering home magazine competitions, and publishing his designs and suggestions in a successful series of books beginning with Houses for Good Living in 1940. For example, in 1938 Life magazine and Architectural Forum joined forces in a competition for moderately priced houses, with a choice of modern and traditional designs in each price bracket. In the category of homes for people with $5,000 to $6,000 incomes, the two winners were a modern design by Frank Lloyd Wright and a traditional one by Royal Barry Wills. Since these designs were intended for a real client, the client had to choose which he would build-and Wills received the nod over Wright. Needless to say, the Wills design was a Cape Cod with a wide wing and garage.

Most of the custom commissions by Wills were in the Northeast, but his published designs were used across the nation. Indeed, a Wills Cape Cod design recently came to light in Jacksonville, Florida!

Mercurial Revivals
Just as it is tricky to neatly define the original Capes, so it is with the revivals. Most important, latter-day Capes usually incorporate concessions to modern living that are modifications of the original cottages. The most common examples are 1) dormer windows that add light to the constricted second floor; 2) larger scale, 3) wings, and 4) a garageÑall invaluable for 20th-century lifestyles. Even so, the basic concept holds steadfast: a small and picturesque dwelling with a fairly steep roof for a second floor. The single to one-and-a-half to double Cape (or one-half to whole) rule remains, but wings are common to provide much needed additional living space. These may be at the side or at the rear, but the central block of the Cape retains center stage. Sometimes the rear of a Cape is expanded to two full storeys with a continuous dormer. Shingles and clapboard siding predominate, either in the hybrid 18th-century manner or uniformly of one or the other cladding, but there may be modern siding like Amazonite or cement-asbestos boards and shingles. Brick walls are also often seen. There may now be a simple cornice, and the roofline may be above the window lintels rather than directly atop them. Roofs are often covered in asphalt shingles rather than dressed-wood shingles. The large, central chimney is almost always retained, though some end-wall chimneys may be found. The door may have a transom, plain or elliptical, and perhaps sidelights and a frontispieceÑor even a canopy. While the originals are ground-huggers, the revivals are typically larger in scale and taller, to allow for modern room height and to raise the building off the ground. Fa¨ades may include bow or bay windows or even picture windows. CellarsÑonce small storage spaces, usually circularÑmay be fully excavated today.

The plan of the original Cape varied, except for the central chimney mass that serviced all fireplaces and a central but tight space for stairs. The new Cape is usually planned more freely with wings, but retains a central chimney as a vestige of the past if nothing more. Wills, in particular, was most successful in thoughtfully planning interiors with compact kitchen/dining rooms to suit modern living. The popularity of the Cape Cod house increased after World War II, as the number and variety shown in home magazines will attest. It may be open for discussion whether these dwellings can be called revivals of the Cape Cod. Beyond the gambrel roof controversy, houses that have large projecting front entrances or continuous dormers on the front may be Capes only in the minds of real estate agents. As always, the picturesque cottage is the basic requirement.

Nonetheless, the concept of a small, 1 1/2-storey cottage met the mass pent-up need for new houses in the 1940s and early '50s, while the size fit within the limits of the public's lean budgets and the nation's immediate postwar shortage of construction materials. Continued variations on the original produced the basic five-room, postwar veteran's house-plain to a fault. This version was soon slightly modernized in the huge Levittown developments that changed the concept of the middle-class suburban house around 1950. While continuing with its own picturesque success, the new branch of the Cape Cod tree grew farther away from its roots to a life all its own, with low gable roofs, carports, and large, steel picture windows. By 1960, the age of the Cape Cod was passing, yet even now some are custom-built for people who remember the charm of the original Cape Cod and its 20th-century revival.