Until the 1870s almost all professional architects in the region were of German origin; only thereafter did the first wave of local Baltic-German architects appear. The first generation of Estonian engineers emerged around 1900; architects, who had mostly studied in Riga, St Petersburg, or various German institutions, a decade later.

By the end of the century, historicism had become dominant. A medievalizing approach (especially Hanseatic Gothic) was adopted by Wilhelm Neumann (1849–1919) and August Reinberg (1860–1908), based in Riga, but active both in today’s Latvia and Estonia. The trend to further gothicize medieval buildings had become widespread with the renovation of Tallinn Town Hall in 1840s and was applied to numerous churches in the countryside.

The first structures to be imprinted with Estonian national symbols were some Lutheran churches built for (and by) Estonian congregations. Still designed by Baltic-German architects and Neo-Gothic or Neo-Romanesque in style, they foregrounded nationalist content: in Tallinn the churches of St John (1867) and Charles (1870, with murals by the first ethnically Estonian painter, Johann Köler, 1826–1899), in Tartu St Peter’s (1884), in Narva Alexander’s (1884, reconstructed).

Subsequently, secular buildings acquired a nationally-Estonian inflection. Karl Menning’s and Georg Hellat’s building for the Estonian Students’ Society (1902) is regarded as the first truly Estonian structure, owing much of its “national” character to the ornamental friezes considered to resemble the belt patterns of folk costumes. This also became the venue for the first exhibitions of Estonian art in 1906 and 1909.

Stylistic alternatives to historicism were explored around 1900 both among the Baltic Germans (Art Nouveau, Heimatschutzstil) and the Estonians (mostly “Nordic National Romanticism” adopted from Finnish architecture). Several nationalist theatre and music societies commissioned their buildings from Finnish architects: the Vanemuine building in Tartu (arch. Armas Lindgren, 1906, destroyed) and Estonia in Tallinn (Lindgren and Wiwi Lönn, 1913, partly rebuilt) were accepted as national monuments soon after completion. Northern Romanticism, though popular, never came to be the equivalent of a national style in Estonia, in that hardly any folk or local motifs were incorporated. It was also fashionable among Baltic-German architects, especially Otto Wildau (1873–1942), e.g. Taagepera manor (1912). Also, the German Theatre in Tallinn (by St Petersburg architects Nikolai Vasilyev and Aleksey Bubyr, 1910) followed the “Finnish style”. The first ethnically Estonian architect was Karl Burman (whom contemporaries sometimes called “the Estonian Lindgren”, 1882–1965), active in a similar style, but influenced by St Petersburg and Swedish examples. He mostly designed apartment buildings and villas.

In comparison to the national awakening from the mid-19th century onwards, the search for an Estonian style in art and architecture was tardy, beginning only in the early 20th century. No Estonian “high art” existed to rely on. It had also become clear that it was impossible to construct Estonianness only on the basis of folk culture, especially as the ethnographic forms had not been preserved without “alien” Baltic-German influences. Close contacts with contemporary European artistic developments were cultivated, unavoidably rendering the national style a synthesis of modern and archaic, urban and rural, “high” and “low”.

In interior design an “Estonian style” (eesti stiil, also called “peasant style”, talupojastiil) is easier to detect, invoking ethnographic forms, wood, and handicraft. Inspired by his colleagues internationally, the leading nationalist painter and activist Ants Laikmaa (1866–1942) had decorated his Tallinn studio and apartment in Estonian style as early as 1904. Most productive was the national painter Oskar Kallis (“the Estonian Gallen-Kallela”), who made numerous furniture designs. In architecture, the vernacular heritage only became a conscious source of inspiration after architects began to be schooled in Tallinn. Exceptions were the few public buildings by Burman: the wooden cottage-like Kalev Sports Club in Tallinn’s Pirita resort (1912, destroyed) with nationalist murals, and the wooden straw-roofed Estonian pavilion for the 1920 Finnish Fair in Helsinki (destroyed). In the early 1920s he also helped Laikmaa design his cottage in Taebla.

Despite lively debates over an “Estonian style” since the turn of the century, no distinctive forms emerged, yet certain elements were interpreted as national nonetheless: ethnographic decoration, additions to international artistic styles, northern Estonian limestone as construction material (whereas in the eyes of the Baltic Germans this had already given a specifically Baltic character to medieval structures). While the (hidden) German influence was impossible to avoid, neighbouring capitals constituted the primary influence, but influences from further abroad reached Estonia through travel and publications, and were re-interpreted to fit the national narrative of progress. As the first symbolic step, Herbert Johanson (1884–1964) and Eugen Habermann (1884–1944), outstanding architects of the inter-war era, demonstrated a desire for a break with the past by opting for modern Expressionism for the parliament building on Tallinn’s Toompea Hill: Riigikoguhoone (1922), reconstructed from a former building of the Teutonic Order, then a tsarist residence and prison.