What Are The Defining Characteristics Of A Tudor House?

The Tudor period in the United Kingdom marks the beginning of large-scale building effort going toward private dwellings rather than religious buildings. With the exception of grand houses (or castles) for regional rulers, houses were rough cottages for workers of the land. But the religious upheavals of the time made the church unpopular, and the emerging merchant and gentry classes began to spend money on themselves.

The most obvious feature of a Tudor house is the exposed timber work, where the wooden skeleton of the house is visible while the gaps between timbers were filled in with brick, wattle-and-daub or flint, depending on the region and the cost. Brick was very expensive and not load-bearing, so was sometimes laid in a herringbone pattern.

Windows were tall and narrow and leaded with small clear panes, reflecting the difficulty of manufacturing, and therefore expense, of glass at the time. Arches over the windows were flatter than the pointed Gothic arches that preceded them. If the owner could afford it, the upper floors often protruded over the lower ones because houses in towns were sometimes taxed on the area of the ground floor. One further typical Tudor feature, again if the owner could afford it, were large ornate chimney stacks in brick, rather than the traditional hole in the middle of the roof, to funnel away the increased smoke that came from using coal rather than wood.