Grenier House Types 2

Continued from Part 1

Two Rooms Wide with Center Hall,
or Three Rooms Wide with Center Room

Influence from English colonial architecture lent the idea of a center hallway, which somethines became a middle room of its own.

Two views, of the front, and front and side, show that this house apparently lacks a center hall, but may have a center room, and has a rear porch. It is in "Vermilionville," another museum village in Lafayette, Louisiana, operated by the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The Suggs House is a later Cajun House, from the 1890s. It shows a later improvement, the center hall (though it may have a Hall & Parlor floorplan, just with a center door).

This is in Lockport, Louisiana, and is featured in "Homes of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - Cajun Homes" on "The Bayou Website" by Paul Nihart.

The House near Highway 1 is another later Cajun House with a center hall.

This is also in Lockport, Louisiana, and is featured in "Homes of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - More Cajun Homes" on "The Bayou Website" by Paul Nihart.

Semi-Bungalow Type

A popular house type of the early 20thC, the "Semi-Bungalow" clearly owes much of its form to the Grenier House. Better known as the Dormer-Front Bungalow or Side-Gabled Bungalow, its incised porch, hulking side-gabled roof, and low earthy looks recall the Cajun House.

Center-Passage, Two-Story, Expanded...

Further evolution grew the modest folk house into a mansion...

The famous "Shadows on the Têche" mansion in New Iberia, Louisiana, is a high-style culmination of the Grenier Type. Now a house museum, it illustrates the lifestyle of an Englishman who bult a grand version of a French-American house form.

The Grenier form remains with its incised porch and porch stairs, but now it has two full stories under the loft, brick walls, Greek columns, symmetrical screened porches at both sides of both porches, symmetrical internal chimneys, and dormers.

More information on it and New Iberia is available in the New Iberia webpage of the Evangeline website.

This sadly dilapidated, and now lost, rural landmark in south-central Ohio shows similarities to the final, enlarged Grenier form and Cajun type. Though this was only single-pile (one room deep), it had an original porch inserted under the side-gabled roof. That porch also had a secondary stairway, at one side. It is nothing like the grandeur of "Shadows on the Têche," but is also nowhere near it.

It was built about 1820 by a John Moomaw on Lower Twin Road in Ross County, Ohio. The Moomaws were probably Dutch by ancestry, a nation and culture adjacent to both France and Germany, which means their architecture could have shared traits and have genetic similarities with the Grenier form.

Built banked into a hillside, the stone ground floor was designed as livestock stabling, with the upper wood-frame levels elegantly finished as a residence.