The Clipped Gable

This photo of a house in Lakewood shows an idiosyncratic treatment of the gable which is frequently seen on Tudor Style homes, Craftsman Bungalows and some Colonial Style homes. This is known as a jerkin-head roof, or simply as a clipped gable. The old term for this construction was "a roof hipped above the wind beams." The wind beams were the horizontal collars tying the rafters together across the middle or upper part of the attic.

Jerkin-head roofs were fairly common in the houses and barns of Kent and Surrey in England, especially of the period 1580-1620, but their origin is obscure They were used on thatch-roofed houses and may have originated in the medieval period as a partial protection of gable-end walls built of wattle-and-daub.

Clipped gables are incorporated into many of the new homes built during the last few years in the M Streets.

Source: Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period, by High Morrison, copyright 1952 by Oxford University Press, Inc.