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
An old house stays healthy when preservation is treated as a system, not a reaction. A long-term plan helps you prevent damage, prioritize the right repairs, and protect historic materials before small issues become expensive losses. Over years of inspecting buildings, I’ve seen that the most costly mistakes come from waiting until damage is obvious—by […]
Every year, I watch owners of historic buildings wrestle with the same dilemma: the rehabilitation numbers don’t close. The scope of work is clear, the craftsmanship is available, but the gap between construction cost and conventional financing remains stubbornly wide. That’s where preservation funding enters the conversation—not as a vague promise of “free money,” but […]
Выбор мастера для реставрации исторического здания — это не просто поиск исполнителя, а решение, которое определит, сохранит ли здание свою подлинность или потеряет её под слоем современных материалов. Квалифицированный специалист по историческим ремёслам делает больше, чем «чинит старое»: он понимает оригинальные материалы, ремонтирует аналогичными методами и знает, когда зданию нужна консервация, а не замена. Он читает […]
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
