DC Row House Styles, From Federal to Today, and Why the Floor Plan Matters More

The front of a DC row house does not always tell you its age. A Federal-style front on Capitol Hill can date from 1965. A "Colonial" porch front in Petworth was built in the 1910s or 1920s. The style of the front tells you how the house was decorated. The floor plan behind it tells you how the house lives, and the floor plan matters more for price.

That idea is not mine. It runs through Alison K. Hoagland's The Row House in Washington, DC: A History (University of Virginia Press, 2023), the best account of how these houses came to be. Builders, she shows, mattered more than architects. They reused a few floor plans for decades and changed the ornament on the front to set one row apart from the next. Nineteenth-century ads rarely named a style at all. They sold brick, and better yet, stone.

So here are the styles in order, with what to look for, and what each one usually sits on. The dates are approximate and they overlap. Builders kept using a style after the next one arrived.

Federal, about 1790 to 1830

Look for a flat brick front, a pitched roof with its ridge parallel to the street, often dormers, and a plain door with a fanlight. Wheat Row, at 1315 to 1321 Fourth Street SW, was begun around 1794 and is one of the oldest rows standing. Inside is what Hoagland calls the two-room plan: one room behind the other. Width decided the layout. Houses wider than about 16 feet had a side hall. Narrower houses had no hall, and the front door opened straight into the front room.

Greek Revival, about 1830 to 1860

Still flat-fronted, with heavier, plainer stone lintels and door surrounds, sometimes thin columns at the entrance. Few speculative rows in this style survive. One example Hoagland cites, Cameron Row on Independence Avenue SW, built around 1848, came down in 1941.

Italianate, about 1855 to 1885

The roof goes flat. Tin roofing, cheaper and lighter, replaced gables in the 1850s, Hoagland writes, and a deep bracketed cornice hid the new roof from the street. Windows grow tall and narrow, often with arched or hooded tops. Behind the front, the house grows a back building: a narrower wing that leaves a light court, so the middle rooms get a window. This is the L-shaped plan, and it carried through the rest of the century.

Second Empire, about 1865 to 1885

One steep slope of mansard roof on the front was enough to signal the style. The Mary McLeod Bethune Council House at 1318 Vermont Avenue NW, built in 1875, is a two-story row house with exactly that: a prominent mansard over a side-hall plan with a back building.

Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival, about 1880 to 1905

This is the most familiar DC row house style, and a law shaped it. In January 1871 the city allowed bay windows to project four feet past the building line. By 1877 multistory bays had to be masonry, and the brick bay became the signature of Washington. Hoagland calculates that on a 16-foot corner lot, bays and towers could add almost a quarter to the size of the house. More than a thousand row houses went up in most years between 1885 and 1892.

Queen Anne pushes irregularity: towers, turrets, mixed materials, dark red brick. By the 1890s the Romanesque influence brings rounded bays that flow into the wall, round-arched windows and recessed arched doorways, with stone at the base where the budget allowed it.

The porch front, about 1906 to the late 1920s

In 1906 a new plan arrived: four rooms on the first floor, hall and kitchen on one side, living and dining room on the other, with no back building at all. Hoagland calls it the quadrant plan. Builders sold it as "Colonial," for the white porch columns more than any real colonial precedent. Look for a two-story front with a full-width porch and, often, a little tiled or slate mansard "rooflet" with dormers that light nothing usable behind them.

Harry Wardman built these by the thousands across Petworth, Columbia Heights and beyond. By the late 1920s the porch and the rooflet were dropped for a plain parapet, and the plan carried on. One correction to a word you will hear: "daylighter" was Baltimore's name for the type, and Hoagland notes it never took hold in DC.

Old English, the 1920s and early 1930s

Dark brick with limestone trim, false half-timbering, steep slate gables and small-paned metal windows. Wardman's English Village off Woodley Road started in 1922. Foxhall Village followed in 1925, and the style spread into Burleith and Glover Park. Underneath most of them is the same quadrant plan. English Village and Foxhall Village were first sold with racially restrictive deed covenants, which the Supreme Court made unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948.

Modern, 1940 and the 1960s

Rare, and easy to date. At 4116 to 4136 Arkansas Avenue NW, architect Joseph H. Abel designed ten row houses in 1940 with no cornices, no window trim and glass-block walls. Modern rows stayed the exception until Southwest was rebuilt. Chloethiel Woodard Smith's Capitol Park row houses, 1959 to 1963, put the kitchen at the front and the living room at the back, opening to a patio. Hoagland calls it the kitchen-forward plan, and it is still in use today.

Colonial Revival fronts and new Federal, the 1950s to today

This is where a front can mislead a buyer about a house's age. The Capitol Hill Restoration Society formed in 1955, and by 1960 more than a thousand houses on the Hill had been "restored," Hoagland writes, mostly by remodeling Victorian fronts into colonial ones with shutters, coach lights and small-paned windows. In 1965 builder Barrett Linde put up Lafayette Row, nine new "Federal-front town houses" on Seventh Street SE. New speculative rows still lean traditional today.

The words, in plain English

The building terms used above, in alphabetical order.

Back building. A narrower rear wing behind the main part of the house, usually holding the kitchen, with a bathroom or bedroom above.

Bay window. A section of the front wall that projects outward, with windows on three sides. In DC it is often two or three stories tall.

Bracket. A decorative support under the roof edge or a window top. A row of brackets under the cornice is the mark of an Italianate front.

Building line. The line, set by the city, that the front wall of a house sits on. Bays and porches were allowed to project past it.

Cornice. The decorative band along the top of the front wall, where the wall meets the roof.

Dormer. A small window that sticks out of a sloped roof, with its own little roof.

Fanlight. A half-round or half-oval window above a front door, often with glass set in a fan pattern.

Gable roof. A roof with two sloped sides that meet at a ridge. On early DC row houses the ridge runs parallel to the street.

Half-timbering. Dark wood strips set into a light wall surface, in the manner of old English houses. On DC row houses it is decoration, not structure.

Light court. The narrow open space beside a back building. It lets daylight and air reach the middle rooms of the house.

Lintel. The beam, often stone, set across the top of a window or door opening.

Mansard roof. A roof with a very steep lower slope, often covered in slate, usually with dormers. On a row house it often appears only on the front.

Parapet. The part of the front wall that rises above the roof line, hiding a flat roof from the street.

Rooflet. The short strip of mansard roof, in tile or slate, across the top of many porch-front houses. It is decoration, often with little or no usable space behind it.

Side hall. A hallway along one side of the house, from the front door to the stairs, with the rooms beside it.

Tower or turret. A rounded or many-sided bay that rises above the roof line, usually topped with a pointed or domed roof.

The floor plans

These four names are Hoagland's. Each one describes how the rooms are arranged, whatever the front looks like.

Two-room plan. One room behind another, the layout of the earliest row houses.

L-shaped plan. A main block with a narrower back building, leaving a light court on one side. The standard layout from about 1860 to 1900.

Quadrant plan. Four rooms on the first floor, two in front and two behind, with no back building. Introduced in 1906.

Kitchen-forward plan. The kitchen sits at the front or center and the living space at the back, opening to a patio. The postwar layout.

What I would do with this

I read the front to get a rough era, then I check it against the record. The two can disagree, and the record has its own blind spot: the assessor enters 1900 when it does not know the true year. In the last two years, row houses recorded as 1900 or earlier sold for a median of $633 a square foot. Houses from 1901 to 1939 sold for $459. Before you pay for age, confirm it.

The fastest confirmation is the building permit. Permits from 1877 to 1949 are on microfilm at the National Archives and the DC Public Library's People's Archive, Hoagland notes, and they give the date, the owner, the builder and the materials.

Then I look past the front. A porch front and an Old English front can share the same quadrant plan, and they will live the same way. An Italianate and a Queen Anne can share the same L-shaped plan with the kitchen in the back building. That is the comparison that matters for price.

The front tells you roughly when a house was built. The floor plan tells you how it will work for you.

Sources. The history in this article draws on Alison K. Hoagland, The Row House in Washington, DC: A History (University of Virginia Press, 2023), with page references kept on file, and the DC Preservation League. The price figures are from DC public records and BrightMLS fee simple sales over the two years to October 16, 2026. If you own a row house in DC, her book is worth your evening.