Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Both an architectural feast and field guide for creating new old houses, Roots of Home traces the development of today's traditional homes from the earliest colonial styles in a visually stunning journey. Russell Versaci takes you back to the beginning, when our ancestors built homes that reflected their Old World pasts tempered with the New World realities. As they settled new territories, they carried the homes of their forefathers with them like a touchstone. They sowed farms and towns with houses similar to the ones they left behind, but suited to the new climates and materials surrounding them. Each old-house style showcased, though always decidedly American--New England Colonial, Pennsylvania Dutch, French Creole, Spanish Mission--represents the cumulative history of generations adapting to new places. With Russell Versaci as your guide, you will see how yesterday's houses evolved into the classic homes we love today and you will learn how to create a new old house that evokes ageless character.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Another Spectacular Book From Russell Versaci October 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

What an amazing book! This book is both an architectural feast and a field guide. Russell Versaci's text and Erik Kvalsvik's photography make this book a treasure that all lovers of traditional architecture and home will want to own. The book is divided into four parts: Our Spanish Heritage, Our French Heritage, Our English Heritage, and our Continental Heritage. In each part, several styles of homes are explored. There is pertinent historical information in each section as well as descriptions of the details of each sort of architecture. There are maps, exterior photographs, interior photographs and detail photographs. Anyone looking for information on restoring or designing a traditional home will find plenty of helpful information in this book. This is not a book that will just sit on your bookshelf or stay on your coffee table. Rather, it is a book you and your entire family will pick up again and again just to read--and to enjoy--long after your building or restoration project has been completed. Versaci deserves a heartfelt thank you from everyone who loves old homes and homes built to look (and feel) like them. Whether you are looking for the correct dormer design or the proper chimney shape for your house--you can find it here. I would encourage anyone to buy this book without fear that they would be disappointed. It's that good!

My favorite chapters? The Swedish Log Cabin chapter and the Texas German Hill Country Ranch chapter. There is just SO much to enjoy in this book. There is everything from the Anglo-Caribbean Plantation to the New Hacienda--and every style of house is explored in detail and photographed in a way that will make it difficult to tear yourself away from this book.

5 out of 5 stars

Explore this fascinating world of new home designs based on old world styles and traditions November 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Interior designers and their clients explore the interior and exterior housing design styles for ideas they can adapt to their own visions of an ideal living space. Explore this fascinating world of new home designs based on old world styles and traditions in the profusely illustrated pages of "Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House". Author and professional architect Russell Versaci, brings part architecture and part history to tell the story of the French, Spanish, English and Continental customs that shaped regional house styles around the country. Included are more than 300 old maps, drawings and photographs of both historic house and new houses in historic styles. Roots of Home presents a rich, captivating portrait of the evolution of American homes and the movement of bring to life in new homes the rich tradition and influences of the past. Beautifully displayed in text and photographs by architectural photographer Erik Kvalsvik, "Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House" is an impressive and recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and academic architecture, design, history and homes reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

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