Minneapolis Neighborhoods: Pattern and Character
Place
A descriptive tour of the city's principal residential districts, organised by the physical logic that produced them: the falls, the car lines, the lakes and the post-war edge.
Index › Place
House Styles Common in the City
Style names are a shorthand for a period, a plan and a set of construction habits. Recognising them tells you roughly when a house was built and what to expect inside.
Sections on this page
AArts and Crafts bungalow
The defining Minneapolis house. Low-pitched roof with wide overhanging eaves and exposed rafter tails, a broad front porch on heavy tapered piers, a dormer across the front slope, and a compact plan with built-in cabinetry, a fireplace flanked by bookcases, and generous woodwork.
Practically: solid, dark, and small-roomed by modern habit. Attic space under that broad roof is often unfinished and low, and the standard renovation question is whether it can be made habitable within the roof line.
FFoursquare
A cube, two full storeys under a hipped roof, usually with a central dormer and a full-width front porch. Four rooms roughly square on each floor, hence the name.
The plan is efficient and adapts well, which is why so many survive with altered interiors. Stair position in the centre of the plan is the usual constraint on reworking them.
MMid-century modern and the rambler
Post-war single-storey building, long and low, with a shallow roof, large windows to the rear, an attached garage and no front porch to speak of. The self-consciously designed end of this period produced flat roofs, glazed walls and open plans; the ordinary end produced the rambler in very large numbers.
Practically: level living, easy circulation and generous glazing, offset by low insulation standards, single glazing in unmodified examples and flat or shallow roofs that require attentive maintenance in a snow climate.
SSplit-level
A post-war plan in which the floors are offset by half a storey, so a short flight connects living space to bedrooms and another descends to a lower level. Common at the city's edge and in the first suburban ring.
The half-levels give a lower level with real windows rather than a basement, at the cost of a great many stairs and a plan that resists opening up.
TTudor revival
Steeply pitched roofs, a prominent front-facing gable, an arched entrance, stucco with applied half-timbering, and often a rounded or catslide roof over the door. Built through the twenties and thirties in the districts that were then desirable.
Practically: charming, complicated to re-roof, and often carrying original steel casement windows that are handsome and thermally poor.
VVictorian frame houses
The oldest widely surviving stock: tall, narrow, steeply roofed frame houses with decorative porch work and bay windows, on the small lots of the earliest platted districts.
Practically: high ceilings, small closets, original systems long since replaced, and the largest maintenance burden of any type here, because there is a great deal of exterior woodwork and a great deal of roof.
DDuplexes and small apartment buildings
Side-by-side and up-and-down duplexes are woven through the pre-war grid in numbers that surprise visitors, along with small brick apartment buildings of the twenties on corner lots.
They are a substantial part of the city's housing and a substantial part of its rental supply, and what may lawfully be done with them is a question of the parcel's permissions rather than of the building's shape.
RRecent infill
New building on cleared or subdivided lots within the existing grid: usually taller than its neighbours, built to current insulation and ventilation standards, with a plan organised around an open ground floor and an attached garage where the lot allows.
Practically: efficient and low-maintenance, and generally at odds in scale with the pre-war blocks around it, which is the recurring subject of local argument about what should be built where.