American Country Houses of Today: A National Survey of Colonial, Tudor, and Spanish Revival Country Houses in Photographs and Plates

A vivid portrait of the American home at the moment it became attainable for the middle class.First issued in 1927 by the Architectural Book Publishing Company of New York, American Country Houses of Today is one of the great recurring portfolios of American domestic architecture, here restored in a clean, faithful Abacus Edition. Far from a single-authored treatise, it is a curated national survey: a critical preface by the noted estate architect Alfred Hopkins followed by plate after plate of recently completed country and suburban houses, contributed by practicing architects from Boston and Philadelphia to Denver, Houston, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles.Every house is documented the way architects actually study a building: exterior photographs paired with interior views and measured floor and site plans. The result is both an inspirational picture book and a practical pattern book. Inside you will find:Colonial Revival houses of the restrained Eastern tradition, with disciplined entrances and cornicesTudor and English Revival work, the steep-gabled "Stockbroker Tudor" of the new suburbsFrench Provincial and Norman farmhouse designs by Architectural League medalist Frank J. ForsterSpanish Colonial Revival and adobe courtyard houses from the California of John Byers and the CraigsRustic mountain lodges and the honest Pennsylvania fieldstone vernacular of Mellor, Meigs and HoweHopkins frames it all with a humane architectural ethic that still resonates: simplicity of plan, good proportion, honest natural materials and texture, and the integration of house, garden, and landscape. His preface also captures a pivotal turn in American life, the automobile-driven democratization that carried the country house from Gilded Age palace to the reach of the ordinary home builder.Who should read this book: architects and designers seeking period-authentic models; preservationists and old-house owners restoring 1920s homes; architectural and social historians of the Country Place Era and the Eclectic Era; and anyone drawn to the golden age of American residential design.This Abacus Edition reproduces the 1927 portfolio and its framing essay together, as they were meant to be read, preserving a documentary record of houses that have in many cases been altered or lost. Read more