The humble bungalow began as a house in the Bengal style
Bungalow comes from Bangla, meaning a house built the Bengali way. The word travelled with the British Empire and changed meaning everywhere it landed. In Canada it means any one-storey home, in Germany a flat-roofed 1960s house, and in Singapore the grandest mansions of all carry the label Good Class Bungalows.
In rural Bangladesh the Bangla ghar is still popular, today roofed with corrugated steel or clay tiles where earlier generations used bamboo, wood and straw that kept interiors cool. Under the Raj, simple dak bungalows lodged travelling officials, judges and mail carriers. In Singapore and Malaysia, colonial bungalows built for officers and senior judges from the early 19th century until the Second World War remain in high demand, and the word entered Malay as banglo.
England's first bungalows appeared at Westgate-on-Sea in 1869 or 1870 as prefabricated seaside holiday homes; the firm Boulton & Paul sold corrugated-iron versions in its 1889 catalogue. Between the world wars huge numbers went up along the coast, provoking a Daily Express writer in 1927 to sneer at bungaloid growth. Ireland later made the bungalow its most common rural house.
America embraced the form from 1900 to 1918, tied to the Arts and Crafts movement, with low gabled roofs, deep eaves and front porches. Sears, Roebuck sold precut kits by mail between 1908 and 1940, shipped by rail. A Massachusetts architect mocked the rampant craze for the bungle-oh. California produced a one-and-a-half-storey variant popular from 1910 to 1925 and the airplane bungalow, with a single upstairs sleeping room ringed by windows. Australia took up the Federation style from 1891 and the California type from about 1908.
The design has trade-offs. With no stairs, bungalows suit wheelchair users and older people, and modest height makes privacy easy with a few shrubs. But each square metre costs more, since a smaller living area still needs a full foundation and roof, and whole neighbourhoods of them spread thinly, feeding urban sprawl. In Australia, broad verandas shade out the heat yet leave rooms dim by day.
Source: Bungalow
