Italianate Charleston is the 1850s telling the brick city it could have brackets, round-arch windows, and a cupola. It is the last big fashion before the war, and then it is the fashion that got earthquake bolts.
Nationally, Italianate is a romantic import: the Italian villa as imagined by American pattern books. In Charleston it shows up as deep eaves with carved brackets, arched windows, sometimes a square cupola. The boom years before 1861 paid for it. The 1886 earthquake left the iron stars.
The earthquake is part of the style now
Those decorative-looking plates on brick walls are tie rods. After August 31, 1886, Charleston pulled its masonry buildings back together with iron. If you buy Italianate or any brick neighbor from that century, the bolts are a chapter in the inspection, not a Pinterest detail. Do not let a contractor cut them for a kitchen.
The 1850s boom was still rice, cotton, and trade. Italianate is not a gentler politics than Greek Revival. It is a different catalog page on the same fortune, then a post-earthquake city that could not afford to throw the walls away.
Buying notes
Brackets trap water. Cupolas leak. Round-arch windows are expensive to replicate if BAR requires in-kind. The 1850s also loved ornament that is now one tree limb away from gutter failure. Budget for roofs and flashings like you mean it.
Questions I get on this house type
Are earthquake bolts only on Italianate houses?
No. They appear on brick buildings of several styles that were standing in 1886. Italianate just happens to be a large share of that late-antebellum masonry.
Is a cupola original?
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a later lookout or a reconstruction. Ask for evidence, not atmosphere.
The rest of the Charleston house-type series
This is one chapter in a set. Start with the overview, How Charleston got its look, or jump to another form.
- The Charleston single house — the form that made the peninsula
- The Charleston double house — the wider English cousin
- Georgian townhouses — Rainbow Row and the merchant house
- Federal Charleston — fanlights and Adamesque interiors
- Greek Revival — columns, cotton, and costume democracy
- Victorian and Queen Anne — catalog millwork after the railroad
- The Freedman's cottage — Reconstruction housing that still stands
- The shotgun house — rooms in a line for air and lots
- The carriage house — from stables and quarters to ADU
- The raised cottage — the living floor above the water
- Craftsman bungalows — Hampton Park and the first suburbs
- Beach cottages — islands, Hugo, and elevation
- Neo-Charleston and New Urbanism — I'On, alleys, and the copied single house
Historic-district rules live in a different note: what you cannot change when you buy in a BAR district.