Second Empire Homes in Massachusetts

What is a Second Empire house?

Second Empire is the stately, French-inspired Victorian that most people picture when they imagine a “haunted house.” It came to America from the Paris of Napoleon III and had its run here from about the 1860s through the 1880s. These were the fashionable, high-style homes of their day, built when a family wanted the whole street to know they had arrived.

Almost all of the look is the roof. Instead of an ordinary peaked roof, a Second Empire house wears a mansard: a steep, near-vertical wall of roof that wraps all four sides, studded with dormer windows and holding a full, usable top floor inside.

Why it’s special

The mansard roof is the whole idea, and a smart one. It turns the wasted space of a normal attic into real rooms with headroom and windows, an extra story without the house looking taller from the street. Then there is the decoration: patterned slate in colored bands or fish-scale shapes, tall paired windows with carved hoods, and lacy iron cresting running along the flat top like a crown.

What it’s like to live in one

These homes feel formal and generous, with high ceilings, large rooms, and light pouring through the tall windows. The top floor under the mansard is often the most charming space, with sloped walls and dormers that make cozy bedrooms or a study. In Massachusetts they cluster in two settings: city rowhouse blocks, above all Boston’s South End, where bay-fronted brownstones with mansard tops fill street after street; and the free-standing mansion, built for mill owners in Worcester, Lowell, and Fall River. The mansard’s slopes and dormers take real maintenance, so budget for the roof along with heating and wiring.

Is it the real thing?

Second Empire is one of the easier styles to spot, because the mansard roof gives it away. If a house has that steep, dormer-filled roof wrapping all four sides, you are almost certainly looking at one. Many share details with the Italianate style next door, like bracketed cornices and paired windows, so the same house can honestly be both; the mansard is what tips it into Second Empire. For classification we look for a build date roughly between 1855 and 1890 plus a mansard roof confirmed in photos, a historic-survey record, or an assessor record.