Jacksonville has one of the great historic housing collections in the South — and almost nobody outside our neighborhoods knows it. Here's a painter's tour of the styles that define our streets, the story of how they got here, and what each one demands when it's time to repaint.
Spend ten years painting houses in Riverside, Avondale, Springfield, Ortega, and San Marco and you stop seeing "old houses." You start seeing eras — who built them, why they look the way they do, and how each style weathers a century of Florida sun. That knowledge isn't trivia. It changes how a house should be prepped, what it should be painted with, and what colors bring it back to life.
It All Starts with a Fire
On May 3, 1901, a spark at a downtown mattress factory became one of the largest urban fires in American history. In eight hours, most of downtown Jacksonville was gone.
What happened next built the neighborhoods we love. A young architect named Henry John Klutho came south to help rebuild and brought with him the boldest idea in American design — the Prairie School style being pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. Jacksonville became one of the few places in the South where Prairie style truly took root. Displaced families streamed north into Springfield and, over the following decades, south and west along the river into Riverside, Avondale, Ortega, and San Marco. Every one of those neighborhoods is, in a sense, a chapter in the story that fire started.
Historic Springfield
Jacksonville's oldest suburb packs roughly 1,800 historic structures into about one square mile: Queen Anne and Victorian ladies with turrets and spindle-work porches, Colonial Revivals with columned entries, Prairie School designs with deep eaves and strong horizontal lines, and rows of sturdy bungalows.
Queen Annes were designed for multi-color schemes — body, trim, sash, and accents each doing their part, sometimes five or more coordinated colors. Flattening one into a single color erases its architecture. All that Victorian millwork also means serious brushwork: spindles, brackets, and fish-scale shingles can't be rushed with a sprayer. And on wood this old, careful scraping, moisture-aware prep, and the right primers are everything.
Riverside
Riverside holds one of the largest concentrations of Craftsman bungalows in the Southeast — around six in ten homes here are bungalows or show bungalow influence, with Prairie, Colonial Revival, and Queen Anne neighbors mixed in.
Craftsman style lives in earthy, muted colors — sages, olives, browns, deep greens — usually a body color, a trim color, and a punchy front door. The signature features are the details: exposed rafter tails, knee braces, tapered porch columns, and wide window casings, each of which needs individual prep and clean brush lines. Rafter tails are also where moisture finds old wood first, so a proper repaint starts with a rot inspection, not a color chart.
Avondale
Developed in the 1920s, Avondale leans toward Mediterranean Revival, Tudor Revival, and Colonial Revival, with more masonry than its neighbors — stucco, brick, and tile on curving, oak-lined streets.
Stucco is its own discipline. Old masonry needs to breathe — seal a 1920s stucco wall with the wrong coating and trapped moisture will pop the paint off in sheets and can damage the wall itself. The right approach pairs breathable masonry coatings with warm, sun-loving Mediterranean tones: creams, soft ochres, terracotta accents. Hairline stucco cracks get properly filled first, because Florida rain finds every one of them.
Ortega
Old Ortega's early-twentieth-century Tudors, Colonials, and Mediterraneans sit under one of the prettiest oak canopies in Florida — which is exactly the challenge. Deep shade plus river humidity means mildew pressure on siding and trim, and constant leaf-and-limb contact wears finishes.
Thorough cleaning and mildew treatment before any coating goes on, products chosen for shaded, damp exposures, and extra attention to the north-facing and tree-shaded elevations that never fully dry. An estate-scale home also rewards a painter who treats each elevation as its own project, because each one is weathering differently.
San Marco
Built as a streetcar suburb around its famous square (say hello to the lions), San Marco carries a graceful mix of Mediterranean Revival, Colonial, and Tudor homes. Its preservation society — celebrating fifty years of work in 2026 — is a big reason the neighborhood still looks the way it does.
Much like Avondale, breathable coatings on the stucco Mediterraneans and disciplined color restraint: these houses look best in period palettes that let the architecture lead. Tudor accents — half-timbering, steep gables — call for crisp two-tone contrast and patient trim work.
St. Nicholas
On the river's south bank sits one of the oldest corners of Jacksonville — the Spanish built Fort San Nicolas here in 1793, and the historic St. Nicholas Cemetery dates to 1849. The housing stock runs from genuine century-old houses along the river bluff to charming 1930s–40s cottages and minimal traditional homes.
The older riverfront homes share the historic-wood rules — assess, scrape, prime right, preserve the old growth. The 1930s–40s cottages are less ornate but every bit as exposed to river humidity; they reward simple, classic schemes and honest prep.
Murray Hill
Established in 1906 and full of bungalows, Craftsman cottages, and Tudor Revivals, Murray Hill has become the neighborhood where many first-time historic-home owners land. Same bungalow rules as Riverside — earthy palettes, detail brushwork, rot-aware prep — often on homes that have waited a couple of decades for real attention, which makes the preparation stage even more important.
The same Craftsman principles as Riverside, but with an added emphasis on assessing deferred maintenance. Homes that have gone a long time between paint jobs often need more wood repair, deeper scraping, and additional primer coats before the finish will hold. The good news: these are well-built houses, and when the prep is done right, they come back beautifully.
Different Styles, One Rule
Every one of these neighborhoods teaches the same lesson: the house tells you what it needs. The substrate, the era, the exposure, the details — a real exterior painting plan starts by reading all of it, not by pointing a sprayer at whatever's there.
That's the approach I've built First Coast Exterior Painting around: walk the home, read it honestly, prep it properly, and paint it with products matched to what it's made of and what Florida will throw at it.