Reimagine the American house:

With a Waterford Architects home, you can embrace the best attributes of past and present design, and enjoy them at a significant savings. Our houses feature traditional floor plans, picturesque facades, and every modern convenience to be expected in today’s housing market. They are also less expensive to heat, cool, and maintain than historic homes, due to the benefits of modern construction techniques and systems.

Stroll through any city or town in America, and you find historic neighborhoods full of beautiful, traditional houses. These homes present their owners with an array of challenges. Besides being notoriously drafty, they are often short on closet space and bathrooms, and kitchens are isolated from other rooms. If the house falls under historic preservation, an uphill battle with beaurocracy can be expected before changes are made. The cost of such renovations, to bring a house up to modern standards, is often equal to or greater than its market price.

But historic homes are beautiful, and elegant. What happened to those qualities? Why are they so hard to find in new construction? The answer has a lot to do with many decades of changing design trends, but mostly, it has to do with the evolution of construction itself.

From colonial times until the 1920s, most houses were built on timber frames. Heavy posts and beams were connected using complex methods of joinery and diagonal bracing. Timbers, if modified at all, were hewn by hand into desired shapes. This labor-intensive method created rigid frames that limited how spaces could be arranged, but gave them clear geometries, strong lines, and a sense of organization.

The advent of dimensional lumber and rigid panels revolutionized the way houses are built. Walls nailed together from identical studs and stabilized with plywood or OSB were quick to build and used less material. Thinner walls, however, made homes feel cheaper and less substantial, and allowed sound to pass easily between rooms. Building each level as a platform to support the story above changed the way floor plans are organized. Without a structural grid to conform to, walls could be placed anywhere. This allowed more freedom and spontaneity to respond to the demands of program, but also compromised elegance and blurred the previously clear-cut sense of organization. Other changes were happening too. Instead of the central fireplace, the kitchen became the center of the home, as families connected around the activities of cooking and eating. Central air meant the fireplace was no longer the main heat source, but it endured, out of a shared affinity for the experience of sitting around a hearth.

In a Waterford Architects home, you’ll enjoy the elegance of timber framing and the convenience of platform framing simultaneously. Every house we design begins with a clear diagram, strong lines, symmetry, and balance. And every design ends with modern conveniences– large, social kitchens, ample bathrooms, plentiful storage and closets, and easily accessible laundry rooms. Combining the best attributes of past and future design is what we strive to do, and it makes every Waterford Architects home unique.