Key to embodiment of a “type, period, or method of construction,” which is by far the most common reason for landmarking, is sorting out the architectural styles that Californias built in and described themselves building in during the nineteenth century, including Greek and Gothic Revivals, Italianate, Neoclassical, Swiss/Bracketed, Neobaroque, Second Empire, Renaissance Revival, Eastlake, Queen Anne, Romanesque, Richardsonian Romanesque, Picturesque, Chateauesque, Colonial Revival, and Knickerbocker—not to mention methods of construction, from post-and-beam to balloon frame to single-wall load-bearing.

Our present-day problem is demonstrated by the fact that Eastlake is the West Coast’s dominant wood style, but because of an angry but inaccurate footnote in a 1971 popular paperback by Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, Eastlake was expunged from guides to American domestic architecture at the height of the Preservation Movement. In contrast, Queen Anne, which gets applied to anything that looks vaguely “Victorian,” is exceedingly rare in California. Another quite rare style here is Swiss or Bracketed, which Scully renamed “Stick”—a name that so delighted amateur preservationists that they applied it to every building they hadn’t called “Queen Anne.” In a 1973 episode of The Streets of San Francisco, Michael Douglas even explains to Karl Malden how an Italianate building is “Stick” because of its square bays (actually an Eastlake characteristic, and the house used for filming, the 1867 Adams House, is an Italianate with clearly and characteristically canted bays). Besides “Stick,” other post-hoc identification of styles like “Shingle,” “High-Peak Colonial,” and “First Bay Tradition” add to the mix—and confusion.