November, 1917 
19 
THE HOUSE of HALF TIMBER 
What It Is and What It Is Not ■— The Picturesque Romance 
of Its History—The Craftsmanship Required—Faking the 
Style—The Modern Revival of Sincere Work 
C. MATLACK PRICE 
Author o* “The Practical Book of Architecture 
E VERY architectural style that has made 
its curtain-bow before the world, and for 
a time occupied the stage of the unfolding 
drama of Architecture, has spoken its lines, 
and had something to say for itself, good, bad 
or indifferent. And of all styles, one which 
comes to us today with peculiarly pleasing as¬ 
sociations and peculiarly pleasing personality 
is the style called “half-timber.” 
But we must not carelessly attribute this 
agreeable personality of half-timber work to 
that purely literary acceptance which sees only 
its romance, or only its historic recollection of 
the brave days of Elizabethan England. To 
appreciate half-timber work to the extent which 
it merits, we should see it first through archi¬ 
tectural eyes. Having done with this, we may 
color the perspective with as many fanciful 
tones as we can find in the paint-box of 
romance. By all means, romance, made up 
of all its elements of the picturesque and of 
historic association, is an important element 
in architectural design—more important, by 
far, than many latter-day architects seem will¬ 
ing to admit. But in true half-timber work 
there are other values of equal importance, or, 
reckoned architecturally, of fundamentally 
greater importance and significance. 
It need not be supposed that these 
values are of a kind so technical as to 
be appreciated and enjoyed only by 
that strange brotherhood of the T- 
square we call architects. Many and 
many a layman finds in them a keen 
and lasting satisfaction. 
What Half-Timber Is 
Half-timber construction, briefly 
defined, is simple enough, consisting 
of nothing more complicated than an 
exposing of the timbers of the build¬ 
ing, as well as the filling, or substance 
of the walls between these timbers. 
This, in itself, sounds not very inter¬ 
esting; the development of the style, 
however, resulted in a type of con¬ 
struction excelled, in its picturesque 
values, by no other. Medieval build¬ 
ers were the first to employ the con¬ 
struction, but few examples remain 
today to impress this fact, and so half- 
timber buildings are generally re¬ 
garded as typically Elizabethan. 
The Elizabethan country house nat¬ 
urally followed the Tudor country 
house, and in Tudor times we find 
many echoes of Gothic feeling, in fur¬ 
niture as well as in architecture. The 
end of the 16th Century saw the emer¬ 
gence of the English country house 
from its earlier fortress-like austerity 
and gloom. The Norman keep had 
given place to the Tudor hall, which, 
in turn, evolved itself into the Eliza¬ 
bethan manor, or country house, and Gll,ies 
later into the still more sophisticated 
country seats of the Jacobean gentry. 
Many ancient houses saw successive addi¬ 
tions and alterations through these periods, so 
that in one building may be read the continu¬ 
ous evolution of the English country house. 
Great Tangley Manor, in Surrey, conceals an 
early Norman keep behind a gracious garden 
front of half-timber and leaded casements, de¬ 
vised to conform with the architectural fash¬ 
ions of Elizabeth’s time, and the original moat 
of the old keep is now spanned here and there 
by graceful rustic bridges and treated as a 
water garden. 
In city architecture, as well as in the coun¬ 
try house, half-timber work reached the height 
of its popularity and esteem during the Eliza¬ 
bethan period, and only of recent years have 
our own architects done much to revive the 
style. For this there are several reasons, 
notably the unavoidable cost of real half-tim¬ 
ber work and the slow appreciation which has 
been accorded to values of craftsmanship in 
architecture. 
Now for an analysis of half-timber con¬ 
struction, in the course of which its inherent 
peculiarities and inherent practical and artis¬ 
tic values will become apparent: 
Every timber building must of course be 
Half-timber architecture permits the introduction of endless 
interesting detail. The indented entrance and casemented 
bay window are examples. Hobart B. Upjohn, architect 
framed, must start with sills and corner-posts, 
and must necessarily have other wall-timbers, 
which today are called studding. 
Hall-Timber Construction 
In the good old days before there were saw¬ 
mills, before lumber was sold by the thousand 
feet, before it was run out in dimensions as 
scanty as building laws would allow, the car¬ 
penters had something like materials with 
which to construct half-timber edifices. There 
was no 2" x 4" structural lumber with which 
to sketch in the frame of the hasty bungalow 
or the ready real-estate cottage. Lumber was 
hewn from the log with an adze, and it was 
easier to fashion timbers 8" or 10" square 
than to work down to finer dimensions. The 
logs were of sturdy English oak, and when a 
framework of heavy timbers hewn therefrom 
was erected, with all the joints tenoned, and 
corner-braces jointed in, there was a fabric as 
staunch as a piece of structural steel-work. 
The frame completed, the spaces were filled 
in, or “nogged” with brickwork or with rubble 
masonry, which was consequently called nog- 
ging, and there, in its barest elements, stood 
the half-timber house. The rubble nogging, 
and often the brickwork, was usually 
coated with stucco to present a more 
seemly finished appearance, until the 
builders discovered that the structural 
facts of half-timber work afforded, as 
well, certain excellent decorative pos¬ 
sibilities. They found that the diag¬ 
onal braces, cleverly contrived, might 
form interesting patterns, and that the 
brick nogging, if managed with a 
view to the spaces to be filled between 
timbers and braces, might easily form 
a variety of diverting patterns. It was 
natural (and an honest heritage from 
Gothic times) that the verge-boards 
and beams should be richly carved, as 
in the “God’s Providence” house in 
old Chester, and that timber-ends of 
overhanging second stories should be 
carved with grotesque heads. There, 
then, was the half-timber house at its 
finest, the windows, of course, being 
leaded casements, with small panes. 
Faking the Style 
Departing, for a moment, from this 
Elizabethan aristocrat of buildings, 
let us look with properly elevated eye¬ 
brows at the knavish parody which 
long contented American homebuild¬ 
ers as a half-timber house, and let 
us inquire, so far as we may, as to 
the elasticity of esthetic and ethical 
tolerance with which we may con¬ 
scientiously regard it. 
Half-timber, popularly regarded, 
came to apply as the designation of 
any house which could boast of half¬ 
timber patterns in its gable ends, or 
elsewhere on its exterior, these pat- 
