Italianate is a nineteenth-century architectural and decorative style inspired by the villas, palazzi and rural farmhouses of Renaissance Italy. Italianate buildings typically have shallow hipped roofs with deep, bracketed eaves, round-headed windows often grouped in pairs or threes, prominent string courses, balustraded terraces and, on many country houses, an asymmetrical tower or belvedere.
The style grew out of the Picturesque movement of the late Georgian period, when architects such as John Nash drew on the Italian landscapes of painters like Claude Lorrain. It reached its height in Britain in the early Victorian decades, encouraged by Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, built for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1840s, and by the palazzo-style clubs and banks of London and the northern cities. Interiors of Italianate houses often feature marble chimneypieces, richly moulded cornices, terrazzo or encaustic floors and furniture in the Renaissance Revival manner. The term is also applied more loosely to garden ornament, fountains and terraces laid out in the Italian spirit. For dealers, Italianate fixtures and fittings such as balusters, urns, brackets and stone fountains remain especially useful for restoring or furnishing houses of this type, where proportion and confident classical detail are what count.
