Abrams Guide to American House Styles

By William Morgan Harry N. Abrams, 2004, 424 pp., hardcover $40. Abrams calls this volume — which is an inch and a half thick, nine inches high, and seven inches wide — “the first compact and uncomplicated all-color-photo guide to understanding the unique characteristics that make a house Colonial or Craftsman, Modern, or Deco, or any of the other approximately 20 styles of domestic architecture common in the United States.” The guide may not be small enough to fit in your glove compartment, but it does concisely identify nearly four centuries of styles, all the way up to Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, and “house styles now,” including today’s unfortunately bloated “McMansions.” William Morgan, an architectural historian who taught for many years at the University of Louisville’s Hite Art Institute and who now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, provides a two-page historical essay on each style and a one-page summary of each style’s “defining characteristics:” its general proportions, roof types and features, structural and exterior materials, spatial organization, chimney placement, entranceway attributes, and use of color. Fifty drawings by Ned Pratt, some of them done with a heavier hand than I would have preferred, depict entire houses or their most significant features. What sets this book apart is its gorgeous collection of 350 color photos — beautifully printed on glossy paper — which Radek Kurzaj shot in more than 40 states. Whereas a typical style guide is an instructional device for identifying styles and periods of houses, the Abrams Guide is an invitation to visual pleasure, an opportunity to see interesting houses sensitively photographed. Kurzaj’s consummate attention to textures, atmosphere, and the play of light and shadow make you feel as if you’re standing right in front of these houses, feeling their presence. The reader comes away with a heightened appreciation of how a good house relates to its climate and its place. I wish the captions had pointed out alterations that have been made to some of the photographed houses over the years. The circa 1890 Stick Style house on the book’s cover, for example, has been outfitted with modern replacement windows on its ground floor. A reader unaware that the windows are not original might inaccurately think it’s a pure example of Stick Style. The Abrams Guide will not displace older guides. My favorite remains the 544-page A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia McAlester and Lee McAlester, first published by Knopf in 1984. The McAlester book, still in print, has a detailed text, plenty of photos (though in black and white, on less expensive paper), a large, instructive collection of line drawings, and useful maps and charts. But if you want to see American house styles in stunning color, in every part of the country, and get a thoughtful and concise introduction to the history of residential design, the Abrams Guide is a breakthrough.