Tudor Style Face-off Images

TOP, Number One. BOTTOM, Number Two.

Your input is needed: Based on your reasoned analysis, gut feeling, woman's intuition, highly developed architectural tastebuds, or whatever other faculty you wish to bring to bear (because they are all relevant), What do you think?

Which Tudor house is the superior design (as far as you can judge just from what you see here?)

For a fuller explanation of the Face-off, GO TO HOME.

March Book Review

Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes of the Twenties, by Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister

This book has been out a while, but was new to me recently. It is worth a look if you haven't seen it yet.

The book chronicles, in text and photos, a mini-movement of sorts in American residential architectrure: "The Storybook Style, a rambunctious evocation of medieval Europe, and surely the most delightful home style of the twentieth century. . . . It appeared on the American scene in the early 1920s, reached its flowering shortly before the Great Depression, and was all but forgotten by the 1930s."

The movement was part of the larger Period Homes movement of the time, and within that movement a kissing cousin to the more familiar Tudor Style.

I look at the era of Period Homes as something of a golden age in American residential design, when designers drew on a variety of American and European traditions to produce mostly modest homes that managed to retain much of the stylistic authenticity and charm of their traditional models while being simplified and adapted to modern life.

A neighborhod full of houses from this time , and shaded by mature trees, is a pure delight to walk through today. We are lucky enough to have quite a few such places near where I live, notably in East Lansing, MI.

The Storybook Style arose in California, with a bunch of movie people involved in it. A subdivision called Hollywoodland was one of the first Storybook neighborhoods--notable for that as well as for the fact that the famous "Hollywood" sign on that hill outside town used to be the "Hollywoodland" sign (the "land" was removed at one point; for the scintillating details, read the book!).

A Storybook house is like a Tudor house, or an "English cottage" or a "French farmhouse"--only more so: camped up with wavy roof shingles and irregular masonry and small-paned leaded windows and such. (For some images, check out Storybookers.com).

The book is fun and informative, and useful to me as a designer for research and inspiration. I would only fault it for not being longer and more comprehensive. But maybe that's not really a complaint--faulting a book because you would have liked more of it!

And now here comes the shameless self-promotion:

Would you like to live in a Storybook house? You could do a lot worse! I would be delighted to design one for you, if you happen to live in lower Michigan. Even if you're further away, we might work something out.
The type of house you live in need not be limited by what is readily available down the street or in the books of ready-made plans, or by what your local builders are used to building.

Come to me with your imagination and your inspiration, and we can most certainly make it happen.Contact me at the blog or email raberdavid@yahoo.com.

And I do want to hear your comments even if you don't plan on building your Hansel and Gretel cottage or mini-castle anytime soon.

"Vinyl is Final," Part 2

And another thing . . .

It's bad enough to put vinyl siding on a new house, in my humble opinion, but downright dastardly to deface an older home with it, especially one with a lot of interesting detailing.

There is a beautiful old "Stick Style" Victorian house in my village, just a few blocks away from me even as I write this. I admire it every time I drive or walk past.

The house's exterior walls are sided sided with wood lap siding that is divided and subdivided with slim boards in the geometric patterns that characterize this style. It is quite lovely, especially since you won't see anything whatsoever like this built today--it would take too much time to build, too much fussy work for carpenters who need to get on quickly to the next porject, probably too much thought to design, too much money, etc. etc.

Now what would this charming old house look like covered over with vinyl siding, all that detail of pattern and other wood casing and molding details gone, gone, gone? I don't need to tell you, because chances are all you have to do is go out your door and drive a litle ways to see an example very much like this one.

Its just as bad with Italianate houses, maybe worse. Usually you see those big brackets under the wide eaves, so characteristic of the style, completely gone, consigned to the dumpster because they were too difficult to get the vinyl siding around, and why would you want to keep them anyway because the whole point of the vinyl is not to have to paint anything anymore?

I'll be back to this again with some links to historic preservation sites and links about vinyl alternatives.

"Vinyl is Final"--Like Death

[Right: It is said that love covers a multitude of sins, which is true. It is also the case that vinyl siding covers a multitude of houses, which then look like they are covered in plastic which is supposed to look like wood, which it does not whatsover, Amen.]

I think it was G. K. Chesterton who once opined that the Fall of Man, or Original Sin, is the most well-attested of all the Christian doctrines.

I would only add to this, if there is one single fact that shows irrefutably the imperfection, the degradation, the inherent fallen nature of our world, it is the existence--and the widespread popularity--of vinyl siding.

Vinyl siding is a fake: It is plastic meant to look like wood. Now, being a fake per se is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, didn't the good Lord himself create the mockingbird and the chameleon and lite beer? No, there's nothing wrong with a fake, as long as it isn't motivated by a bad intention, and as long as it's a good fake, a convincing fake that stands in for the real thing without offending the eyes.

Vinyl siding is a very bad fake, as anyone can see, and in a perfect world, or even, one suspects, a world just a bit less vile than our own, it would not be tolerated. Yet in our world it is not only tolerated, but bought and sold by the tons every day of the week and slapped up with great abandon on houses old and new.

And it's all because of nothing but sin, brothers and sisters, or rather two particular sins from among the Seven Deadlies: Sloth (or laziness) and Avarice (greed).

The stuff itself is plainly ugly as sin, and yet when viewed through the eyes of Sloth ("I'll never have to lift a paintbrush again!") and the eyes of Avarice ("It's half the price of real wood siding!"), this baddest of bad fakes seems a Godsend and a beautiful thing.

Or maybe it doesn't seem positively beautiful; maybe we just resolve not to look at it anymore, not to think about it--we feel so satisfied in our pocket books as we sit there in the la-z-boy watching TV.

Is the story so far not depressing enough? It gets more depressing when we ask ourselves why vinyl siding has got to try to look like wood siding. Couldn't it look like itself somehow, and be used in its own way with integrity, as the non-traditional material it is, perhaps even fathering its own type of style?

But no! It turns out that mimicking wood siding makes for the perfect shape for a thin plastic siding. That zig-zag cross section gives it stiffness and stability, and a handy way for it to lock together, and it sheds the water off the wall just right. It's positively diabolical, as if Satan himself had cooked up this conspiracy: "I'll give the humans a cheap and durable type of siding for their houses, but ensure that it will look like Hell, and watch their fallen natures lead them to gobble it up like popcorn!"

"Vinyl is final," folks like to say in my neck of the woods. Ostensibly they're talking about an end to scraping and painting, but to me those words sound like the clap of doom--and I'm only half kidding.