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
Every old house carries a timeline in its walls, floors, and repairs. If you know where to look, you can read that timeline and separate the original building from later changes, which is the key to understanding what the house is, what it has survived, and what kind of restoration it actually needs.
Why a […]
Tracing the previous owners of a historic property is equal parts record hunting and detective work. The fastest route almost always starts with the deed, then branches into tax records, census returns, city directories, probate files, maps, and local archives. Each source adds a layer until the ownership story begins to take shape — not as […]
Every old house carries a story in its bones—but that story is rarely handed to you in a neat folder. It comes in fragments: a saw mark on a floorboard that doesn’t match the rest, a seam in the foundation where two generations of masons met, a sudden spike in the 1893 tax assessment that […]
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
