By 1720, the two-story house, two rooms deep, was common. The general prosperity was increasing, bringing with it a growing demand for better and more important-looking houses. During the next thirty years, existing houses were made more attractive by external additions that reflected the style of the larger house and mansions. The simple doorways were dressed up with pediments and pilasters, the plain windows ornamented with molded architraves. The facades were given an air of importance and solidity by replacing corner boards with pilasters and quoins; the roofs finished off with box cornices trimmed with moldings and supported by dentils. Inside, the doors and windows of these houses were made elegant with applied moldings and cornice moldings.
All of this heralded the adoption of the Early Georgian style of architecture for houses of modern size. Meanwhile bricks were becoming more plentiful, and therefore cheaper, making it possible to build smaller chimneys at less cost than the old masonry piles featured in early New England houses. Those who built new houses at this time could therefore well afford to adopt the new style, and have two chimneys instead of one. They did, however, adhere to the practice of keeping the chimneys entirely within the house by building them into the longitudinal walls. The chimneys of the northern Early Georgian houses therefore usually center on the ridge at a distance of several feet in from the gables. Each chimney provided two fireplaces back to back on the main floor, and could incorporate two more on the second floor if desired.
This radical change in chimney location made possible a much more flexible floor plan. With a central hall, circulation of air as well as people was considerably improved, and a much better stair arrangement could be adopted. This stair now gave access to each second-floor room.
In many of these Early Georgian houses, the kitchen was regulated to an ell, leaving one of the rear rooms usable as a dining room. From about 1750 on, until after the Revolution, a great many fully developed Georgian houses were built. These had chimneys in the gable walls, and the former high-ridged roofs gave way to low and inconspicuous ones, sometimes entirely hidden by a balustrade and crowned by a captains walk.
In some of these houses, the chimneys for each pair of end rooms would merge and appear as a single stack at each end of the ridge. In larger houses, four separate stacks would be carried up to adorn a hipped roof.
While more and more of these houses were built of brick, even in New England, still more were of wood that simulated stone or brick. In the later Georgians, larger windows with bigger panes balanced one another in a symmetrical facade. Doorways were framed with sidelights and pillared porticoes, and a Palladian window above it replaced the single flat-topped window after 1750 or so. After 1790, square-topped triple windows may have been used instead. Windows and doors alike were pedimented. Then, to make the houses even more imposing, they were mounted on a high foundation reached by broad masonry steps.
In both early and late Georgian houses a great deal of attention was paid to detail. Formality was the keynote, inside and out. Paint in an extensive variety of colors, rather than white, replaced pine interiors. Ornamental corner cupboards were built in, and Early Georgian fireplace walls were encased in panels. In the later years the paneled walls were replaced by dadoes with a papered wall above them.
Both to provide extra interior space, and to give a more imposing appearance to the Georgian houses, dormers were sometimes added. In Early Georgians with their gabled roofs these dormers were usually square with a peaked roof. In later designs the dormer windows were surmounted by a complete pediment, either triangular or arched. In the larger houses with four dormers, two might be arched and two triangular.