bungalow

bungalow [Indian bangla, =house], dwelling built in a style developed from that of a form of rural house in India. The original bungalow typically has one story, few rooms, and a maximum of cross drafts, with high ceilings, unusually large window and door openings, and verandas on all sides to shade the rooms from the intense light and tropical heat. Dwellings of this general type became popular in S California, with numerous differences in plan and materials, and were termed bungalows. The word thus came to be used for a cottage or for any small house with verandas covered by low, wide eaves.

bungalow. Corruption of the Hindustani bangla, meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’, applied to one-storey lightly built detached dwellings, often with thatched roofs and surrounded by a verandah. The word appears as Bungales as early as 1676 in relation to housing for servants of the East India Company, but as bungalow certainly by 1711. The word was later applied to describe single-storey houses throughout the British Empire and in the USA, and became usual to indicate any single-storey detached house (often a second home by the seaside or, more usually, a first house in a suburb, especially immediately after the 1914–18 war). Some large isolated bungalows were erected on land owned by J. P. Seddon at Birchington, North-East Kent, from the late 1860s, to designs by John Taylor and Seddon himself: the Indian idiom was preserved, with broad overhanging roofs and side verandahs, in Tower Bungalows (1880s—which also had sgraffito decoration between the applied timber decorations).

Bibliography

A. King (1982);
Lancaster (1985)