Architectural heritage
Building histories, restoration guidance, and careful notes on the craft of old houses, written for owners and for anyone who stops to look twice at a cornice.
Read the house historiesOne house, six lives
Hand-hewn oak sills and posts, pegged mortise-and-tenon joints, and a massive center chimney that heats every room.
A new front with flat pilasters, a wider entry with sidelights, and six-over-six sash windows in wavy cylinder glass.
A bay window, a porch with turned posts and sawn brackets, and a slate roof replacing the original cedar shingles.
Knob-and-tube wiring and the first indoor plumbing are threaded through plaster and lath, room by room.
Siding over clapboards, dropped ceilings, an enclosed porch. Most of the original fabric survives, hidden rather than lost.
Layers are documented before anything is removed. Windows are reglazed, plaster is reattached, and the frame is left to speak.
From the archive
After fifteen years of walking through old houses, I’ve learned that plaster tells the truth about a building if you know how to listen. A crack running diagonally from a window corner isn’t just a crack — it’s a record of how the framing settled in 1923. A hollow patch above the baseboard might trace back […]
Wood siding is the face a historic house presents to the world — the first clue to its age, regional tradition, and the hands that built it. But that character survives only when moisture, paint failure, and small defects are caught early. The maintenance formula is straightforward: inspect on a rhythm, trace every problem to its […]
When I walk up to a historic house, my eye goes straight to the windows. Not just because they frame the façade—though they certainly do—but because the glass, the muntin profiles, the way a sash meets its frame, all tell a story about who built the place and when. Original windows are among the most […]
Every old house is a document. Before you repair it, learn to read it, because the most valuable thing a restoration can keep is the evidence of how the house was made.
Catalogue of subjects
