The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me - partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they're not especially interesting to me, or - I imagine - to you.)
Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.
- 2/2, San Francisco CA: $550K
- 2/2, Oakland CA: $699K
- 3/2.5, Oakland CA: $749K
- 4/3.5, Sausalito CA: $4M
- 2 units: 2/1 + 1.5/1, Berkeley CA: $1M
- 3/1.5, Berkeley CA: $795K
- 3/2, Berkeley CA: $860K
- 3/1, Oakland CA: $789K
- 3/3, Oakland CA: $740K
- 3/2, Oakland CA: $769K
- 3/1.75, Phoenix AZ: $775K
- 3/2 + 24 acres in Rome ME: $415K
