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 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 […]
A floor in a historic building is never just a surface. It’s a document: decades of foot traffic, rearrangements, repairs, and successive building campaigns have left their mark. Keeping that evidence intact demands a deliberate approach—clean gently, repair only what truly needs intervention, and whenever you replace something, match the original material and method. […]
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
