House Guides
How to Identify the Architectural Style of Your Home
A practical method for identifying your home’s architectural style through period, form, openings, materials, details and later alterations.
Read article →STYLES · INTERIOUS
Styles are clues, not conclusions.
Style names are useful shorthand, but they are not the building, object or interior itself. Interious follows how movements emerged from particular people, places, technologies and debates — how they changed in practice, travelled across regions and were reinterpreted over time.
A style is a pattern of relationships.
Style becomes useful when it helps explain relationships: between period and place, theory and practice, structure and material, makers and the work they produced. Treat the label as a hypothesis to test against the evidence rather than a checklist to impose on it.
Real buildings and objects often overlap movements, retain older habits or anticipate what comes next. That ambiguity is part of the history, not a problem to hide.
Origins & Reaction
Ask what came before, what problem a movement tried to solve and what later designers rejected.
Theory & Practice
Compare what was written, taught or proclaimed with what architects and designers actually built and made.
Sources & Reading
Use contemporary journals, books, catalogues, manifestos and technical literature to reconstruct what makers could know in their own time.
Place & Transmission
Follow how ideas change with region, climate, industry, craft traditions and local habits.
Makers & Works
Connect movements to the people, buildings, interiors and objects through which they became real.
Material & Detail
Use construction, materials and repeated details as evidence — never as a decorative checklist.
Move sideways through History and Details whenever the style label alone is not enough.
Follow the transformation, not just the label.
Movements do not cross borders unchanged. Ideas travel through people, publications, exhibitions, schools, trade and industry, then meet different climates, materials, clients and building traditions.
British Arts & Crafts and American Craftsman are connected, but they are not interchangeable. Art Nouveau developed distinct regional languages; Art Deco changed again as it moved through Europe and the Americas. Interious follows those routes so resemblance becomes explanation.
Continue through Connected Histories and its first focused route, Europe to America.
From the Journal — Styles & movements
Style Histories
Art Deco: European Origins and American Evolution
From the 1925 Paris exposition and Ruhlmann’s crafted luxury to skyscrapers and Streamline Moderne: how Art Deco changed across the Atlantic.
Read article →
Style Histories
Arts & Crafts: From Britain to American Craftsman
How British Arts & Crafts ideals around craft, material and honest construction evolved into the distinctly American Craftsman language.
Read article →Understand the logic before you choose the label.
The Styles layer is a way into the wider Interious knowledge network, not an endpoint. Use it to connect movements with their historical context, makers, buildings, interiors, objects, sources and details — then follow those relationships wherever the evidence leads.