Classic Greenwich Houses


Book Description

Elegant and welcoming houses in bucolic settings by Charles Hilton, a leading traditional architect in Greenwich. This book presents nine spectacular houses, each responding to an equally spectacular site. They are the work of Charles Hilton, a leading traditional architect in Greenwich, Connecticut, whose firm has been honored with multiple regional and national awards including Palladio and Stanford White awards. As an architect, Hilton is committed to designing imaginative buildings that inspire and delight and to creating a humanistic architecture that embodies the aspirations of his clients. He works in traditional vocabularies--principally Georgian, Beaux-Arts and shingle style--with exquisite classical detailing, but his houses are also completely contemporary in incorporating state-of-the-art technology and sustainable design. As he observes, "Our clients rely on our creativity and ingenuity to create houses that honor tradition, while seamlessly integrating modern amenities essential for contemporary living." Hilton has practiced in Greenwich for more than thirty years, and he is completely fluent with its rich and diverse architectural heritage. This means that his houses, while meticulously detailed and impressive, are also beautifully integrated into the panoramic waterfronts, rolling lawns and rustic back-country landscapes that are characteristic of Greenwich and the surrounding countryside.




Greenwich Style


Book Description

A glimpse into the "quintessentially Greenwich" homes that are stately and elegant yet designed for the comforts of family life. Greenwich is one of the most desirable communities in the United States, with houses that epitomize the suburban tradition. With their handsome facades and elegant interiors, these homes provide inspiration to decorators and homeowners nationwide. More than almost any other community, Greenwich signifies a classic look, a way of living, and a state of mind. Cindy Rinfret’s successful Classic Greenwich Style was the first book to celebrate the style of this classically American town and bring its renowned look to a nationwide audience. Now, the beloved designer returns with an all-new selection of interiors that will appeal to a new generation of homeowners seeking elegant yet comfortable design. Specially commissioned photographs showcase the designer’s signature "young traditional" style: a warm blend of color, contemporary materials with traditional shapes, antiques with transitional pieces, English-style furnishings with family heirlooms, and spaces for entertaining and family life. In her own words, Rinfret offers an intimate look into these stunning interiors—including Rinfret’s own classically styled house, Laurel Hill—and shows how people who covet the look and style of Greenwich can create it for themselves.




The Classical American House


Book Description

Forming part of its Classical Architecture Collection, this latest compilation volume by IMAGES, The Classical American House, reveals an enticing glimpse into the exquisite architectural works of innovative and skilled contemporary classicists.




The Art of Classical Details


Book Description

-A lavish and beautifully illustrated sourcebook of classically inspired architectural detail -A valuable resource for architects, interior designers, builders and home decorators -Featuring a foreword by renowned interior designer David Easton -Highlights projects by US architects including Marc Ferguson & Oscar Shamamian, Peter Pennoyer, Quinlan Terry and Gil Schafer. Features a foreword by David Easton, arguably America's most respected decorator. Contributors also include historians Jeremy Musson and David Watkin. In The Art of Classical Details, classically trained architect Phillip Dodd takes a close-up look at some of the finest examples of neo-classical architecture in the world today. Covering the fundamentals of classical architecture, such as Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite columns, and featuring the work of skilled contemporary classicists, including Julian Bicknell and Ken Tate, The Art of Classical Details is the definitive guide to today's world of neoclassical architectural detailing.




Midcentury Houses Today


Book Description

Architects Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, Edward Durell Stone, and others created an extraordinary collection of modern houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, in the 1940s and 1950s. The bucolic New England town—a suburb of Manhattan—became the site of fervent experimentation by some of the leading lights of the movement in the United States, the architects known as the Harvard Five, whose modern aesthetic could be traced to the Bauhaus school of design. There they promoted their core principles: simplicity, openness, and sensitivity to site and nature, and built glass, wood, steel, and fieldstone houses that established architectural modernism as the ideal of domesticity in the twentieth century. Architects Jeffrey Matz and Cristina A. Ross, photographer Michael Biondo, and graphic designer Lorenzo Ottaviani present this vanishing generation of iconic American houses as more than an issue of restoration or preservation, but as an evolving legacy that adapts to contemporary life. Selecting a representative group of sixteen houses covering the period between the 1950s and 1978, they portray each one in great detail, with floor plans, timelines, and both archival and luminous new photography—from the clean, minimalist look of the initial construction, to subsequent additions by some of the most significant architects of our time including Toshiko Mori, Roger Ferris, and Joeb Moore. Voices of the architects and builders, original owners and current occupants combine to describe how the houses are enjoyed and lived in today, and how the modernist residence is more than just a philosophy of design and construction, but also a philosophy of living.




Adventures with Old Houses


Book Description

This is the story of one man's adventures in acquiring and bringing back to life some of America's most enticing and historically significant dwellings. With the eye of a connoisseur, the business acumen derived from a legendary career in international finance, and a Jeffersonian grasp of classical architecture, Richard Hampton Jenrette reveals his charming, often risky, ventures in the world of old houses.




A Sense of Place


Book Description

Thirteen exquisite houses create a portrait of life in one of America’s most exclusive coastal destinations, along the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Hutker Architects, led by founding principal Mark A. Hutker, has designed more than three hundred houses along the New England shore. A member of the close community on Martha’s Vineyard since his arrival in 1985, Hutker has become an expert at interpreting the ideal lifestyles of his clients within the respected traditions and restrictive codes of the beautiful but fragile environment. In their design and construction, these houses honor the vernacular traditions of craft and indigenous materials, are deeply respectful of the cherished landscape, and demonstrate a lively range of solutions to building on the bluffs and dunes that line the shores of the Vineyard and Cape Cod. A working organic farm fulfills a family’s dream of simpler values; a luxurious renovation saves the best of an antique shingle cottage while transforming it for contemporary family life and a raised structure clad in naturally weathered boards combines the legacy of midcentury regional modern architecture with Cape Cod’s maritime tradition. The firm is committed to the principle “Build once, well,” looking to the historic architecture of the region and the inherited experience of its carpenters and craftspeople as inspiration for contemporary design. The result is an architecture that is at once adaptable and livable, yet enduring, efficient, inevitable, and appropriate. The houses sit lightly on the land, deferring to their surroundings, often built as a series of modest pavilions linked by passages or grouped to enclose an outdoor space. Creative design solutions—a light-filled gallery running the full length of a house, a continuous wall of sliding glass doors—make houses both open to views, but protective in a storm. Specially commissioned photography captures the craftsmanship and the settings of the houses, from dramatic bluffs overlooking the sea to secluded coves and rolling meadows filled with wildflowers, creating a unique portrait of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.




At Home in Tennessee


Book Description

A celebration of the antebellum decorative arts of Tennessee, this volume depicts 20 historic homes that have retained their original furnishings. Each entry includes a brief history of the home's construction and occupants, detailed descriptions of its decor, and naturally lit color photographs.




The Iconic House


Book Description

"The Iconic House features one hundred of the most important and influential architect-designed houses in the world."--Inside cover.




A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses


Book Description

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.