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
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 […]
A successful historic home restoration rarely starts with a wish list. It starts with the building itself—its materials, its story, and the quiet evidence of how it has weathered the decades. Over years of working with old houses, one pattern repeats: the projects that take time to read the building before making changes are the […]
Restoring a historic home is rarely a straight renovation. The biggest challenges usually come from hidden damage, outdated systems, preservation rules, and the difficulty of making modern comfort work without erasing the building’s character.
If you are planning a restoration, the smartest approach is to treat the house as both a structure and a historical […]
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
