Kerry Phillips, one of the founders of the Sacramento Bungalow Heritage Association, which tirelessly protects the many beautiful Craftsman homes in my own neighborhood of midtown Sacramento (as well as the rest of the historic neighborhoods of our city), has an excellent short essay defining this sometime-contentious word up on the SBHA site.
Here in Atlanta, any house that was built between 1900 and 1940 gets called a “bungalow” if the realtors can pull it off. This sucks to no end.
That’s because a bungalow is any house built between 1900 and 1940. The term means a “small house” and can encompasses many different types of bungalows. The term is very elastic. In America, bungalows houses were not supplanted as a popular house style until the Minimal Traditional style house came long prior to World War II.