Getting Back to Roots

Last April Russell spoke at Bundoran Farm in Virginia during Charlottesville's Design Week. Here is a short clip in which he introduces his book Roots of Home, which chronicles the 500-year history of American house styles from their European origins to the present day:

The Cradles of Classic American Home Styles

From Roots of Home: the Ten Colonial Cradles

America’s classic home styles were born in ten regional cradles that nurtured distinctive house forms rooted in Old World traditions. Below are the ten regions -- and the main vernacular house styles that emerged from each region's particular blend of culture, geography, climate, and resources:

St Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys

The first French settlement was founded at Port-Royal on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1604, followed by exploration of the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley.

NORMANDY FARMHOUSE, ACADIAN COTTAGE

New England Coast

English Pilgrims established Plimoth Plantation on the New England coast in 1621 and spurred the founding of compact villages from Connecticut to Maine.

SALTBOX, CAPE COD COTTAGE, GARRISON COLONIAL

Hudson Valley

The Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1624, while French Huguenots and Flemish Walloons settled into the Hudson Valley from New Jersey to upstate New York.

DUTCH GABLE TOWNHOUSE, HUDSON STONE FARMHOUSE, DUTCH GAMBREL

Delaware Valley

The Delaware Valley was first home to New Sweden (1638) and later Pennsylvania (1682), a haven for English Quakers as well as German and Scots-Irish émigrés.

SCANDINAVIAN LOG CABIN, PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH FARMHOUSE

Chesapeake Bay

On Chesapeake Bay, the Virginia colony was founded by the English at Jamestown in 1607, followed by Maryland established at St. Mary’s City in 1634.

CATSLIDE COTTAGE, WILLIAMSBURG COLONIAL, PALLADIAN MANOR

Carolina Low Country

The Carolina Low Country and its tidewater coast were first settled in Charleston in 1670 by English planters with roots in the Caribbean islands.

TIDEWATER PLANTATION, CHARLESTON SINGLE HOUSE, SOUTHERN I-HOUSE

Florida Peninsula

The Spanish established North America’s first settlement in Florida at St. Augustine in 1565, as well as a mission chain linked through Tallahassee to Pensacola.

SPANISH COLONIAL CASA, ST. AUGUSTINE HOUSE

Gulf Coast

Settled by the French at New Orleans in 1718, the Gulf Coast attracted French and Spanish Creoles, Acadians from Canada, and free blacks from the Caribbean.

CREOLE COTTAGE, FRENCH COLONIAL PLANTATION, SHOTGUN HOUSE

Southwest Borderlands

Starting in the early 17th century the Spanish crisscrossed the Southwest borderlands founding presidios, missions, and pueblos from Arizona to Texas.

PUEBLO ADOBE, DOGTROT LOG CABIN, TEXAS ROCK HOUSE

Alta California

Alta California was the last Spanish frontier where a chain of twenty one missions was created from 1769-1823 along the coastline from San Diego to Sonoma.

SPANISH COLONIAL CASA, MONTEREY HOUSE

Tidewater Cottage in the News

Recently, several media articles have appeared that chronicle the pre-fab tidewater cottage and our Simple Farmhouse designs. Below are links to these articles as posted on the Web, sans images:

• As McMansions Begin to Die Off, Look to the Past for Housing's Future, Washington Post, Housewatch, November 15, 2008, Katherine Salant
  
  Creating a New 'Old House' Section by Section to Feel Like Home, Rappahannock News, November 13, 2008, Laura Ruby

The original dozen designs in the Simple Farmhouse Portfolio, which you can view in detail on our firm's website, are styles that were commonly built in the Southern Piedmont region. Joining them is a new collection of Chesapeake Tidewater houses; a slightly tweaked version of the tidewater cottage is the first design in the collection. In addition to the Simple Farmhouse designs, which range from 1600-3200 sf and can be built from kits of parts or modular units, we are developing a new collection of small houses designed and engineered specifically for modular building. The new collection is called the Simple Cottage Sampler, and it will be available in 2009.The first ten cottages in the collection are inspired by the Ten Colonial Cradles of Home, which Russell wrote about in his new book, Roots of Home. The Colonial Cradles were the places in America that served as the seedbeds for our early house styles. Each of the Simple Cottages is an American classic style that emerged from a specific Colonial Cradle region.

We are hoping to build the first modular cottage on the exhibit floor at Restore Media's Traditional Building Show in Boston in mid-March. It is a real stretch to make that happen in just three months, but when the cottage design is ready, the process of modular building is very, very fast.

Roots of Home's Official Pubdate

Today is the day that Roots of Home is officially available. For nearly a year we have been speaking, writing, quoting, and citing October 14 as the new book's pub date, but now that it's finally here, it's a quiet morning in Lake Wobegon.

People have other things on their minds today, as do we. So long eagerly anticipated, the book's due date has arrived in the midst of the worst economic week in decades. It does tend to suppress one's euphoria.

Still, beauty is beauty, and no bad news can alter the luminous, otherworldly, timeless appeal of the Poche Ezidore House, shown in this image from Roots of Home. This early 1800s Creole cottage in Gramercy, Louisiana, was lightly restored to repair structural problems but otherwise left with period detail and original surfaces unchanged. In Erik Kvalsvik's photo of the light-bathed dining room, one can almost sense the hush, the stories in the walls, the soft footfalls over centuries.

And that's the news from Lake Wobegon.

More "Roots of Home" Endorsements

Katrina Cottage

We have received additional endorsements for the new book, which will be on bookstore shelves on October 14th. We are grateful to author and interior designer Alexandra Stoddard, architect and Katrina Cottage designer Marianne Cusato, National Trust President Richard Moe, and Charleston interior designer Amelia Handegan as well as to a number of earlier contributors for taking time from extremely busy schedules to review the galleys and offer comments. All of the endorsements are posted on the online media site for Roots of Home.

HABS and Historic Precedents

Russell's new book is titled Roots of Home, which is how he refers to the particular mix of culture and customs that shaped an area's classic home styles. The first settlers in a region took building traditions they knew from where they came from and adapted them to the climate, resources, and landscape in the new place. Through the years the styles of the houses evolved with new migrations and cultural influences, and they are still changing today as they're modified to fit how we live in the 21st century.

To plan a new old house, we begin by researching the native-grown homestyles of the place in which the house will be built. In our office at Russell Versaci Architecture we have an extensive architectural library with more than 1000 volumes; many are antiquarian and most are out of print. On the shelves are hundreds of books with old drawings and photographs of houses that serve as a great resource for researching vernacular traditions.

Although we feel fortunate to have this extensive architectural library on site, we also rely on another resource -- one that's available to anyone with a computer. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) is a huge electronic archive of drawings and photographs of early American architecture that is free and easy to search on the Library of Congress website. (For the story of HABS, read Russell's column titled Picturing Home, which appeared in the summer issue of New Old House magazine.)

All this information serves to introduce the drawing at the top of the post. It is a HABS drawing of a house that served as a historic precedent and design inspiration for the prefab tidewater cottage. The house was called Maidstone, and its record states that it was located in the vicinity of Owings in Calvert County, Maryland. Beyond that little bit of information, we don't know anything else about the house, like whether or not it still exists. Many of the houses in HABS are no longer standing. The project was begun during the WPA years to document in photographs and measured drawings the early architecture of our country before it fell to ruins or was bulldozed to make way for the march of progress.

Endorsements for "Roots of Home"

James Pitot House, 1799, New Orleans, LA,
from Roots of Home/photo by Erik Kvalsvik

In the past several weeks we have been delighted and honored to receive some wonderful endorsements for Russell's upcoming book, Roots of Home. Quotes have come in from architects Allan Greenberg and Robert A.M. Stern, Barbara Sallick of Waterworks, National Building Museum director Chase Rynd, interior designer Thomas Jayne, Thomas Gordon Smith and Bill Westfall of the Notre Dame University School of Architecture, British architect and INTBAU founder Robert Adam, Institute of Classical Architecture president Paul Gunther, and Lizz Plater-Zyberk of DPZ. The quotes are posted on our online media site here, along with lots more information on the new book, which will be published in October.

Roots of Home

The final cover design for my new book, Roots of Home, arrived from Taunton Press. The photo was taken at the Tillman house, a new old house designed by Ron Arnoult in Louisiana. It was shot by Erik Kvalsvik, who took the photos for Roots of Home as well as for Creating a New Old House. Between the two books, Erik and I logged a lot of miles together traveling across the country photographing new old houses. Fourteen-hour days, the uncertainties of weather, and the stresses of travel made for some hard times, but our shared love of red wine, old books, and vintage clothes made it bearable.