Queen Anne

The grandest house Chicago builds can carry a kitchen with real, confident color. Here is how to do it and still honor the wood.

Towers and turrets, wraparound porches, stained millwork made to be admired. We design to the Queen Anne's character, across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

The high point of American Victorian

The Queen Anne is the most ambitious house of the Victorian era, the style most people picture when they picture a Victorian at all. It ran roughly from 1880 into the early 1910s, the confident, prosperous decades when American builders had pattern books, railroads to ship millwork, and a real appetite for ornament. The result is a house that refuses to sit still. Where a more reserved style draws a calm box, the Queen Anne breaks the box on purpose.

You know one when you see one. The massing is asymmetrical, no two sides the same, with a roofline that climbs and turns through steep gables and dormers. A tower or a turret anchors a front corner, sometimes capped with a candle-snuffer cone. A porch wraps around the front and side, deep enough to live on, carried on turned posts and trimmed with spindlework. The wall surface itself is a composition, clapboard below giving way to bands of patterned shingle above, fish-scale and sawtooth and diamond, so that the house changes texture as your eye travels up it. Bay windows push out from the main rooms. Stained or leaded glass catches the light in the gable peaks and over the stair.

In Chicago the Queen Anne comes in two builds. There is the frame version, the classic painted-lady silhouette of wood clapboard and shingle, common in Old Town and the older near-North and near-Northwest streets. And there is the masonry version, brick or rusticated stone with the same restless roofline and the same ornate detail rendered in heavier material, the grand homes you find on the best blocks of Wicker Park and threaded through the Gold Coast. Both share the same instinct. This was a house built to be looked at, decoration treated as a virtue, character chosen on purpose.

And the ambition kept going once you stepped inside. Ceilings run tall, often ten feet or more on the main floor, so every room reads with height and air. The interior woodwork is the real event. Deep baseboards, elaborate door and window casings, a carved newel post and turned balusters on a staircase meant to make an entrance, picture rails, pocket doors that slide into the walls, built-in cabinetry and benches in the bays. Much of it is stained hardwood, oak and sometimes a darker species, finished to show the grain rather than hide it. The Queen Anne was built to carry color and pattern and ornament without flinching, which is exactly why it is one of the few Chicago styles that genuinely invites a bolder kitchen. The one rule that never bends is the millwork. The trim is the soul of these houses, and whatever happens in the kitchen has to honor it.

What is usually going on in a Queen Anne kitchen

The original Queen Anne kitchen was never meant to be seen. It was a service room, plain and tucked at the back of the house, usually with a butler's pantry standing between it and the formal dining room, a buffer where the good china and serving pieces lived. The cooking happened out of sight, and the deep, tall room that held it was finished simply compared with the parlor and the stair hall. Almost none of those service kitchens survive in original form, so a Queen Anne kitchen today is whatever its renovations made it, and a house this old has usually seen several.

A few situations come up again and again. Many of these homes were carved into flats and rooming houses through the middle of the twentieth century, then restored to single-family later, which often means the kitchen was rebuilt wholesale in a 1980s or 1990s remodel. That is the era of honey-oak and yellowed maple raised-panel, cabinetry that has slid well out of trend and now reads heavy against the rest of the house. In a more carefully restored Queen Anne you may instead find a tasteful inset or Shaker kitchen that already speaks to the period, sometimes already painted in a heritage tone. And in the grand restored homes of Wicker Park or the Gold Coast, the kitchen is often a true showpiece, designer-led and held to a very high standard.

Two original features are worth their weight when they survive. The first is the butler's pantry. If yours still has its pantry cabinetry, its glass uppers, its run of drawers, that is a feature people pay to add to new homes, and it should be protected, not gutted. The second is any original built-in, a bench in a bay, a corner cabinet, a stretch of stained casework that has been part of the house since 1895. Whatever the starting point, the constant is the woodwork just outside the kitchen, the deep casings and tall baseboards and that show-piece staircase, all setting a tone the kitchen is meant to match.

The brief here is a little different from the more reserved Chicago styles. A Queen Anne can carry real, saturated color, and for a lot of homeowners that is what finally makes the room feel like it belongs to the house. A crisp white or softer palette suits it just as well if that is what you love. Either way, the job is to choose that color, and choose what stays as wood, so the kitchen converses with the millwork rather than fights it.

How we'd approach it

The Queen Anne gives us two genuinely good roads, and the right one depends on what your kitchen is made of right now. If you have original or good-quality wood worth celebrating, we lean toward refinishing. If you are working with dated or mismatched cabinetry, we lean toward painting in a rich heritage color. Often the best answer is a marriage of the two.

Refinishing, to bring original wood back to life. When a Queen Anne kitchen still holds real wood, the truest move is frequently to restore it rather than cover it. This is exactly what our refinishing work is for. Our Revive path takes the existing wood to a new, richer stain color when the old finish has gone orange or flat or simply out of trend, returning depth and warmth to the grain. Our Refresh path restores a finish that has only dulled and tired over the years, bringing back the sheen without changing the color. In a house where the dining-room woodwork and the staircase are stained hardwood, a kitchen that answers them in restored wood can be the most authentic result of all. And wherever original built-ins or pantry cabinetry survive, our instinct is to preserve and restore them, never to tear out what a century has already proven.

Painting, with permission to use real color. When the cabinetry itself has to change, a factory-smooth, sprayed paint finish is the move, and here is the good news that makes a Queen Anne special. You can be braver with color than in almost any other Chicago house. These rooms were built to hold saturation. A deep forest or hunter green, a confident oxblood, a moody navy, a soft heritage black, a warm bottle-blue or a deep heritage grey can be genuinely beautiful on Queen Anne cabinetry, and against tall ceilings and ornate trim a saturated kitchen reads rich and intentional rather than overdone. We love a two-tone here, a colored lower with a lighter upper, or a painted run with a contrasting island. The whole point is the marriage of color, the pairing that sits beautifully with your floors, your light, and above all your woodwork. We bring a designer in on any sizable Queen Anne project precisely so the color is settled in the room before a single coat goes on, because a saturated color is unforgiving if it is the wrong one. This is the work behind our Curated Design Session, getting the color right in your actual light, with your actual trim, with a sample we can leave with you.

A word on original woodwork. In a Queen Anne, the cabinets can take color, but original stained millwork is often the best thing in the house. If your casings, baseboards, staircase, and built-ins are beautiful stained wood, we are happy to talk through the options for keeping them as wood and letting the kitchen play against them, since a richly stained surround with a painted kitchen is a classic Queen Anne pairing. We would rather not see irreplaceable original woodwork painted over to chase a trend, so we will always raise it so you have the full picture. But it is your home and your call, and whether you want to keep the wood, paint it, or refresh trim a prior owner already painted, we are glad to make it happen and help you get it right.

On door styles and refacing. A Shaker front is the safe, period-friendly default and looks right under a heritage color, and an inset Shaker, where the boxes allow, reads the most appropriate of all in a house this old. For something a touch more tailored, an Artesia brings a custom feel with its beveled inside edge, the most popular of our fronts and easy to live with because it does not hold dust. If the door style itself is what drags the room down but your boxes are sound, refacing keeps your good carcasses and gives you brand-new fronts in a profile that suits the house. The carcasses in these homes are often genuinely good, which makes many a Queen Anne a strong candidate for refacing.

Bolder than a bungalow, more disciplined than it looks, and always loyal to the wood. That is a Queen Anne kitchen done right.

Where Chicago's Queen Annes live

The Queen Anne turns up across the older city and the inner suburbs, but a handful of areas are especially rich in it. Old Town, and the Old Town Triangle above all, holds some of the oldest housing in Chicago, frame Victorian and Queen Anne cottages on narrow streets that predate the modern grid, a few of them survivors of the 1871 fire and rebuilt in the boom that followed. It is a neighborhood that takes its history seriously and protects it.

Wicker Park is the Queen Anne showpiece of the near Northwest Side. The great brick and stone mansions along Hoyne and Pierce were built for Chicago's prosperous merchant and brewing families, Queen Anne and Romanesque piles with towers, turrets, and carved stone, many restored to single-family and now among the finest homes in the city. If you want to understand what a Queen Anne can be, that is where you look.

The Gold Coast carries its own grand masonry Queen Annes among the mansions and rowhouses just back from the lake, a district built to impress and still doing it. And the style reaches well beyond the city. Oak Park is a living museum of pre-Prairie housing, with Queen Anne and frame Victorian stock from the 1880s and 1890s in a village that knows exactly what its architecture is worth. You will find more Queen Anne and Victorian threaded through parts of Lincoln Park.

We know these homes, the woodwork that makes them, and how to give a Queen Anne a kitchen with real color, or restored real wood, that still honors every inch of its millwork.