Abstract. The Loewner equation provides a correspondence between continuous real-valued functions λ t and certain increasing families of half-plane hulls K t . In this paper we study the deterministic relationship between specific analytic properties of λ t and geometric properties of K t . Our motivation comes, however, from the stochastic Loewner equation (SLE κ ), where the associated function λ t is a scaled Brownian motion and the corresponding domains H\K t are Hölder domains. We prove that if the increasing family K t is generated by a simple curve and the final domain H\K T is a Hölder domain, then the corresponding driving function has a modulus of continuity similar to that of Brownian motion. Informally, this is a converse to the fact that SLE κ curves are simple and their complementary domains are Hölder, when κ < 4. We also study a similar question outside of the simple curve setting, which informally corresponds to the SLE regime κ > 4. In the process, we establish general geometric criteria that guarantee that K t has a Lip(1/2) driving function.