I know I’m not alone when I say I grew up dreaming of living in an old, beautiful home someday. Older houses possess a particular charm that is no longer present in nearly any of today’s new homes.
However, this is not the path life has taken us! My husband and I are so blessed to have the opportunity to instead, build a new home on three beautiful acres of meadow. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to build a new home that captures the charm and beauty of an old home. I would need to learn how to accomplish that feeling with a new build. While I’ve been carefully observing homes I love for years, I would need to translate my inspiration into one buildable, affordable design. We also have limited budget and are already making compromises on space and functionality, not to mention aesthetic design decisions.
As many homesteading families seek to move to acreage and build their own homes, I know I”m not alone in wanting to capture the old world charms of historical houses in a newly-built home. In this series, I’m going to break down three main principles to follow when you set out to find or create a design for your own home build. These concepts can also help if your home isn’t historical, but you are renovating it and aim to transform a soulless, builder-grade greyscape into the warm, welcoming timelessness of a home of yesteryear.
Key #1 to capture historic beauty in a new home: Not Fake.
Modern, unenchanting homes are fake. Old, beautiful homes — and those built in their spirit — are real.
Fundamentally, a charming new-old house doesn’t try to look like something it isn’t. Let's explore several ways this plays out.
It doesn't try to look more wealthy than the budget can actually afford to do well.
Instead of adding false or poorly conceived displays of wealth, a charming house is humble when it needs to be, and adds quality upgrades when able.
The homes of the wealthy use the larger budgets first on high-quality design, and then on tasteful, authentic luxuries. A modern house that lacks historical charm uses excess budget on increased size and added visual complexity. These gaudy shows of wealth are often haphazardly designed and non-functional.
Yes, yes I know, who doesn't want to live in a lighthouse? I'm not the only one who fantasized about that as a child, right? Maybe this home is your cup of tea at first glance, but compare it with the home on the right, an authentic oceanfront shingle home in Maine. Rather than a fictional lighthouse, it has a genuine tower (with way more windows for ocean views!) And its charming gambrel roofline makes the extra false gables unnecessary. It, too, has porch pillars, but they are supporting a far more substantial porch!
OK, but what about a lower-budget house? (Which far more of us are trying to build.)
Let's compare these two houses. On the left is a small house built in the 17th century on Cape Cod, and on the right is a plan currently available at houseplans.net. It appears in their "small house" category and is just over 1200 sq ft. This house doesn't possess historical charm because, even at a small size and likely modest construction budget, it is still aiming to go big or go home. A chunky, super-sized porch pediment dominates the house, sporting structurally useless timber beams, yet offering very little shade. Meanwhile, the entrance of the historical cape has a carefully designed surround that gives a stately feeling to the home, however tiny it may be. Modern homes will almost always try to WOW you somehow, even by wasting precious dollars on clumsy statement features. A new-old home with timeless grace chooses understated, carefully designed elegance instead.
Historical and new-old homes don't try to look complex when they're really simple.
Take a look at the first home. Notice the numerous gables (triangles at the roof level) facing us on this home. None of them are part of the structure of the house, they are merely added on to make the facade look more intricate. The facade bumps a few feet in and out, just enough to accommodate the addition of these excess gables. This house could be completely flat across the front, but the designers were likely afraid of a flat facade. So, they split it into unnecessary sections that don't add any benefit to the layout inside; they merely make the house more complicated and more expensive to build. (Honorary mention to the missing shutter at the far left... and the upper right where there wasn't space for them...)
Contrast this with the second house, which is flat across the front, but not uninteresting in the slightest. With dormer windows in the attic, chimneys, dentil crown molding, and a well-designed door surround, this home is beautiful — with none of the fakeness.
(Speaking of the door surround, check out the first home again. The entrance is shaded by an overhang which looks like it was sawed in half in order to fit in its place, and is only supported by one column. The door itself appears to have no trim except a thin white strip. :/)
Timelessly beautiful homes don't try to make one material look like another.
This porch is made of plastic that is trying to look like wood, and this siding veneer is plastic trying to look like stone. Although vinyl is often the cheapest option, and many of our budgets are tight, I would urge you to avoid it wherever possible. It looks fake and it can't be maintained or repaired, so it will inevitably become trash. For my own home, I would rather forgo a feature than select a plastic one. I know that with modern codes, we sometimes have our hands tied. You may be forced to add a railing that you didn't budget for. Just know that choosing a real material over plastic goes a long way!
(The home with the stone veneer also has a bumpout so it can show off an extra gable, something that's unnecessary in the floor plan of the house, and you definitely wouldn't bother to do if you were building with stone.)
The historic home doesn't pretend to be functional when nonfunctional.
Another staple mistake: flat shutters that are tacked on to the exterior wall (first photo). Shutters used to protect windows from harsh weather, but now they are added as copies.
Notice in the second photo, how the shutters are casting a shadow on the house. They are mounted on hinges, and the slats can actually be raised or lowered to let in light. These shutters are three-dimensional because they are functional objects. The false shutters are a plastic cut-out of the real thing.
It doesn't try to copy traditional features that don't belong.
This first house imitates traditional craftsman porch columns with masonry bases. However, because this house is not designed as a craftsman bungalow, there is no roof overhang, and nothing for the large columns to support. They are plastic imitation accessories. The genuine craftsman house on the right has chunky columns that support the roof over the large front porch overhang, which is a quintessential feature of this house type. (Not only are the fake columns appropriated from the craftsman tradition, they are also non-functional; see prior point.)
Conclusion
In conclusion, new homes that have any chance of capturing the beauty of a historic house must strive to be real and not fake! This seemingly abstract idea works itself out in multiple facets of the house's design, from the overall layout to the front facade to the materials selected.
A new-old cape cod house by Early New England Homes
In my next post, I'll talk about what I'm dubbing Key #2 to building a home with historical charm: Tradition. What traditional values did people hold when it came to building homes that allowed even the working class to make environments that we still look back on today with fascination? How can we adopt those same attitudes toward our own home?
In the future, I'll also be sharing numerous sources for affordable, historically-inspired house plans and a big list of all the resources I've drawn on while learning about this topic, from books to youtube channels. To get an email when a new post is completed, sign up for my email list below. I also share my art and seasonal life as a mom & beginner homesteader.
Thanks for reading!
Comments