Old house near 5th Street, corner with Guadalupe St. in Downtown Austin, Texas.
Sorry for the blurry photo. Hard to keep the phone steady on the bus.
A decidedly steamy building. I don't think there's anything quite like this in the British Isles.
We have quite a few left in Downtown Austin, but more in the satellite city of Georgetown, and many times more as you approach the French part of the country. Note that the French style in wrought iron percolates in the design elements of the house. I Have posted the Littlefield House at the University of Texas at Austin, on this forum many times, so if you haven't seen it, just Google it on this thread or online. The thing about Texas Victorian homes is that they are related to the American Southern plantation homes (this house shown on Guadalupe is rather big), and the materials used include a liberal amount of limestone, and if not for a more quaint house, then aat least for the foundations.
Texas sits on a limestone basin which comprises the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico, as the Gulf was much larger millions of years ago, so the whole ground is made up of limestone (which is another name for crustacean shell deposits accumulated over eons). The cities of San Antonio, Austin and Waco lie on an arcing geologic fault parallel to the coast known as the Balcones Escarpment, which divides the dry flat part of Texas and the rolling hill wet parts of Texas as you close in on the Gulf.
So wealthy Texans could afford to build large Victorian homes and buildings using stone, whereas the materials change as you go into other areas of the country.
