Burghley House in the context of "Queen's House"

Elizabethan architecture refers to buildings in a local style of Renaissance architecture built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England from 1558 to 1603. The style is very largely confined to secular buildings, especially the large prodigy houses built for the newly-risen nobility close to the court. Many ordinary buildings continued vernacular styles with little decoration. New religious building had ended abruptly at the Dissolution of the Monasteries from c. 1536. English architecture was late in adopting Renaissance standards compared to the rest of Europe, and in the Elizabethan style northern Europe rather than Italy was the main influence. After Elizabeth a new court culture of pan-European artistic ambition under James I (1603–1625) saw the style morph into Jacobean architecture. Stylistically, Elizabethan architecture is notably pluralistic. It came at the end of insular late Gothic traditions in design and construction called the Perpendicular style in church building, the fenestration, vaulting techniques, and open truss designs of which often affected the detail of larger domestic buildings. In the late part of the 16th century, illustrated continental pattern-books introduced a wide range of architectural exemplars, fueled by the archaeology of Ancient Rome.

As church building turned to the construction of great houses for courtiers and merchants, these novelties accompanied a nostalgia for native history as well as huge divisions in religious identity, plus the influence of continental mercantile and civic buildings. Insular traditions of construction, detail and materials never entirely disappeared. These varied influences on patrons who could favor conservatism or great originality confound attempts to neatly classify Elizabethan architecture. This era of cultural upheaval and fusions corresponds to what is often termed Mannerism and Late Cinquecento in Italy, French Renaissance architecture in France, and the Plateresque style in Spain.

Prodigy houses are large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either "noble palaces of an awesome scale" or "proud, ambitious heaps" according to taste. The prodigy houses stretch over the periods of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture, though the term may be restricted to a core period of roughly 1570 to 1620. Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm. Many are therefore close to major roads, often in the English Midlands.

The term originates with the architectural historian Sir John Summerson, and has been generally adopted. He called them "... the most daring of all English buildings." The houses fall within the broad style of Renaissance architecture, but represent a distinctive English take on the style, mainly reliant on books for their knowledge of developments on the Continent. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was already dead before the prodigy houses reached their peak, but it has been said that his more restrained classical style did not reach England until the work of Inigo Jones in the 1620s, and that as regards ornament, French and Flemish Northern Mannerist decoration was more influential than Italian.