Design Ideas

The Enduring Influence of the Southern Farmhouse Style

From the ever-present porch to a focus on cross ventilation, these classic Southern features continue to inspire today’s homebuilders.

While no one is going to confuse the 2023 Southern Living Idea House—with its more than 5,600 square feet of living space and countless modern amenities—with a traditional 19th-century Southern farmhouse, there are elements of the home that reference this distinctly American architectural style.

The core tenets of Southern building, like porches, cross ventilation, and tall ceilings, come through loud and clear in the house, and are just some of the examples of this enduring design movement.

The reasons these farmhouse features continue to resonate with 21st-century architects, builders, and—most importantly—homeowners should be very familiar for anyone looking to build, buy, or renovate: the timeless desire for fresh air, sunlight, and inside-outside living. Things that were necessities for more comfortable living in the pre-air-conditioning age are now traits that come up time and again to describe a home’s ties to the natural world, vibrancy, and overall livability.

We sat down with residential designers Bill Holloway and Luke Sippel of Lake + Land Studio to learn about some of the key features that make a Southern farmhouse-style home.

Porches

Choose your favorite “as Southern as” cliché (let’s go with sweet tea this time), and that’s exactly how ingrained porches are in the Southern building tradition. It could be a grand wrap-around porch, a sleeping porch, a morning porch, or an afternoon porch, but if it’s a Southern farmhouse, it’s going to have a porch.

For the Southern Living Idea House, the porch offers a connection to the outdoors, and this bringing-the-inside-and-outside-together comes courtesy of a Marvin Ultimate Multi-Slide door.

“There's that giant door that opens up to the outdoor space, the porch. For us, that is an extension of the home,” Holloway said.

The Southern tradition of this home extender offers all sorts of housekeeping and comfort-capturing benefits. And like most everything on this list, the design followed a need. When your house doesn’t have air conditioning on a sweltering July day, your only chance for relief is a bit of shade and hope for a cooling breeze. Thus, a porch. It’s the place where muddy boots can be dropped off before entering the main house, and where you can find protection from the withering heat of the afternoon sun, cover from a fast-moving thunderstorm, and a place to sit and hope a breeze stirs up.

“Deep porches are, for sure, a farmhouse thing,” Sippel concluded.

Cross Ventilation

If porches are the No. 1 trait of a Southern farmhouse, aligning the windows in the front of the house across from the windows in the back is surely 1a. Sippel explained why:

“You wouldn't have had AC. So, during those hot summer months, when most of the farming is going on, you come home and you're ready to relax. You want to be cooled off,” he said. “So, by having those windows and doors aligned, you're getting incredible cross ventilation.”

There’s a reason people still wax poetic about Southern breezes, and if you noticed one in a home, there’s a decent chance it can be chalked up to cross ventilation.

You wouldn't have had AC. So, during those hot summer months, when most of the farming is going on, you come home and you're ready to relax. You want to be cooled off. So, by having those windows and doors aligned, you're getting incredible cross ventilation."

Luke Sippel

Lake + Land Studio

Tall Ceilings

Taking a trip back to middle-school science class for a second: Warm air rises. This fact wasn’t lost on the builders of traditional Southern farmhouses. Any chance they had to cool their living spaces through their practical designs was taken advantage of. Cue the tall ceilings.

“Taller ceilings are a very classic Southern thing, historically, in farmhouses that were built prior to the invention of indoor heating and cooling,” Holloway said. “The ceilings would have been much taller so the hot air could rise. That's a very visual cue for how Southern farmhouses would have been.”

As you may have guessed, modern developments like central heating and air conditioning brought the ceilings down in the name of energy efficiency: lower ceilings mean more efficient heating and cooling.

“Once [central air conditioning and heat] came along, the scale came down to like an 8-foot ceiling,” Holloway said, “but traditionally, in a true farmhouse, the ceilings would have been much grander.”

Exposed Rafter Tails

Long seen as a tell-tale trait of a Craftsman-style home, exposed rafter tails also appear on Southern farmhouses. (What’s a “rafter tail,” you ask? Think exposed beams on the underside of the roof.) Again, this now-common design element was more of an economic choice than an aesthetic one for traditional builders. Completely enclosing the soffits meant increased material costs, not to mention additional labor. Leave the rafter tails exposed, and you avoid all of that.

“Exposed rafter tails are a detail you’d find often,” Sippel said. “That's a really big part, in my opinion, of what makes a cottage style and farmhouse style are those exposed rafter tails. It's a very specific detail that speaks to that style.”

Metal Roofs

Well-known for their durability and heat-reflecting properties, metal roofs have been a staple of Southern homes since the 19th century. The 2023 Southern Living Idea House carries on that tradition, and for the same reasons they were the choice of the 1800s.

“The lighter color reflects the sun’s rays, and it helps on heating and cooling,” Holloway said. “Here in the South, we do have a lot of heat and humidity, so the more we can help our heating and cooling systems, the better. It also gives an overall classic, timeless feel that speaks to the location.”

“It being a farmhouse,” Sippel added, “it really speaks to that vernacular.”

And then there’s the durability.

“If you were to do a shingle roof, that's got a fraction of the life span and longevity of a metal roof,” Holloway said. “It's really a good, long-term, low-maintenance product.”

Additions Over the Years

For the Lake + Land team, honoring the through-the-years style of a main house surrounded by what look to be “newer” additions was important; the idea that these additional rooms and living spaces were added over time.

For a traditional farmhouse, these new living spaces would have grown around the home organically. But for this modern take on the look and style, it was very intentional and planned from the beginning, and meant to add a timeless look to the house. To the team, this was a nod to the very Southern farmhouse nature of the home.

“As Bill said, there’s the cross-axis ventilation [as a Southern trait], but also how the forms are put together. When you see the very front of the house, it looks like it was built out over time, which is a very Southern thing. People would build the main core house and then, as life went on, and they had good business ventures and made it to the next phase of life, they’d add on.”

Building Materials

Pulling up to a Southern farmhouse, oftentimes one of the first things you’ll notice is the variety in exterior cladding. What might be weatherboard in the middle gives way to stone, then perhaps brick. For the Idea House, this was a very intentional wink at its “additions.”

“Talking about how [the house was] done over time, the additive structures are clad in stone,” Sippel said, “and that would have been a more expensive, more costly way of doing construction.”

“Having those stone buildings on the side, with wood in the middle, really grounds the entire building to the site.”

Fireplace Positioning

Many of the design choices of the Southern farmhouse spawn from a need to cool off. But not all of them. Fireplaces were standard in a 19th century farmhouse, and where they were placed had a common theme:

“Traditionally in the South, fireplaces would have been located on the outside of the house,” Holloway said, “but [in the Southern Living Idea House], it’s embedded in the middle.”

Keeping in mind the concept that this house was added on to over the years, this makes sense.

Holloway continued: “But if you imagine the house being developed over time, the core of the house—that main living room being a phase one—at that time, that fireplace would have been on the exterior of the house, and it was built up around it.”

In a world where practicality dictated almost all of the design choices, the reason for building the fireplace on the exterior of the house was a simple one: self- and building-preservation.

“Because in the South, a lot of times the fireplaces would catch on fire, and they built them so they could literally knock them down if there was a fire outbreak.”

No matter if it’s something as commonplace as a porch or slightly harder to pinpoint, like where a fireplace is located, the unique attributes of the Southern farmhouse continue to capture the imagination of today’s architects, builders, and homeowners alike.

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A couple stands on a porch with fall colors in the background of a home with Marvin patio doors and windows.