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Title: French Country House Plan: How to Get It Right and How to Screw It Up
Word Count: 938
Author: Ralph Pressel
Category: Home & Family
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Ralph Pressel
http://www.beforethearchitect.com
French Country House Plan: How to Get It Right and How to Screw It Up
INTRODUCTION
French Country is a popular home design style nowadays,
both exterior and interior.
This article addresses the French Country home design style
on the exterior.
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?
Do you think that French Country, or the effected Country
French, is a home design style? We'd say, "Not exactly."
French Country is a range of home design styles –
1. From an early French farmhouse to not quite a French
embassy
2. From residential design styles, including but not
limited to Rustic French, Rural French, French Provincial,
French Eclectic, Chateau (French version of the English
Manor House), and the namesake French Country
3. From in-between Cajun style and Louisiana Plantation
style
4. From the time period in America bracketed roughly by
WWI and WWII
Comment: There is a stylistic kinship of sorts with other
home home styles that are casually (and incorrectly) taken
as singular and not as a set. For example, American
Victorian is a/k/a (Victorian, in each instance) 2nd
Empire, Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, Folk, Stick,
Shingle, and Richardsonian (Romanesque). Or for example,
Southern Colonial ranges from Warburton House (1680) in
James City County, VA or Christ's Cross (a/k/a Cris Cross)
(circa 1690) in New Kent County, VA and simpler, all the
way up to Bacon's Castle (1650) in Surry County, VA and
Stratford Hall (1725) in Stratford, VA [noting that other
examples abound either standing, or artistically captured
earlier-on or reproduced, the author having chosen these
for their geographical and temporal proximity,
Post-Medieval English roots, and breadth of character].
You'll find beaucoups publications about French Country on
Amazon.com and at your local bookstore. To wit, along with
a slew of other design-oriented books, a while back we
ordered Provencal Inspiration: Living The French Country
Spirit by Home Planners, and immediately received a notice
that Amazon's out of stock. French Country is back bigtime.
As another, more recent example, our just completed custom
house plans in French Country Style for a property in
Asheville, NC will be offered later this year at $4+
million [and the facades really do have a rural sense to
them].
French Country style reminds us more than most of Craftsman
style – multiple roof slopes; windows of different sizes
and heights; broad overhangs and soffits; knee braces and
other exposures of construction structure; front-facing
gables; a mix of gable, clipped gable, shed, and hip roofs;
natural materials; masonry exterior, especially stone; a
mix of finish clads; restraint in exterior accessories and
adornments. French Country style can be comfortable and
inviting in its more relaxed presentations.
However, French Country home design departs from the Arts &
Crafts Movement in several respects: high-peaked, steeply
sloped roofs at pitches way above Craftsman's; a refinement
in exterior trim particularly in rakes; an understatement
of observable structure; gutter systems sometimes with
gussied-up copper appointments; curved rooflines to
accommodate steep slopes, larger windows, unpierced
ceilings and interior walls; broad soffits; arches and
curve-topped dormers, elaborated ironwork; balconies;
turrets; Classic columns; masonry accessories in relief,
some interest in symmetry, etc. Simplicity and elegance.
There are ways to botch French Country home design, e.g.,
hold rooflines to one pitch to assure consistent soffit
depth and single-level eaves – in the name of cheap, easy,
and stylistically insensitive; apply Corinthian columns in
lieu of, say, Tuscan, or flute the Tuscan columns; confuse
French styling with English, unbalance vertical and
horizontal to favor horizontal; not mullion grouped
windows, not apply true French casement windows; use
plastic shutters, S-dog the shutters, not apply true French
doors, asphalt shingle the roof, insist on broad facia and
frieze boards, etc.
And there are ways to develop French Country home plans by
using - contemporary technologies, among them, e.g.,
cost-efficient cultured stone, particularly in its
fieldstone representations – perhaps by Owens Corning; and
by using artistry, e.g., the half-round copper gutter
systems of A. B. Raingutters, Inc., Classic Gutter Systems,
L.L.C., the gas or electric luminaires of Charleston
Lighting Company or the aluminum wrought-like railing of
Southeaster Architectural Metals, the garage doors of the
Carriage House Door Company, and the like.
French Country style encourages applying design principles
of excellent residential design, such as, Russell Versaci's
Creating a NEW OLD HOUSE: Yesterday's Character For Today's
Home, The Taunton Press, 2003, and Jacobson, Silverstein,
and Winslow's Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of
Enduring Design, The Taunton Press, orig. 1941, reprint
2002; and, separately, sacred geometry. Here again, you can
embrace and succeed or disregard and fail in the design
effort.
Take, for example, the layering and other arrangement of
finish clad, notably in steeply sloped gable ends. In
Versaci's realm of signaled, or suggested, age, it is the
wise designer who specifies supposedly older, heavier
(looking) materials – fieldstone and the like – from grade
up to, say, L1, and then some lighter material higher up.
Such arrangement and layering would be particularly
in-keeping with more steeply sloped roof gable ends which
would most unlikely be originally run up 2 stories under
high, hard to support roof pitches. That is, L2 should and
would appear to be of more recent vintage than L1, and
presenting a story of age without such attention to detail
is to send the gift horse packing.
Finally, in the vernacular of Patterns of Home, again for
example, the French Country style readily lends itself to
creating a courtyard, or "Creating Rooms, Outside", and to
dormered space demonstrating design keystones of "Refuge
and Outlook" under a "Sheltering Roof," particularly if the
rooflines are low-profiled and trimmed more simply on L2
than on L1.
----------------------------------------------------
Before The Architect designs and drafts custom home plans
nationwide. Its principals Ralph and Jean Pressel have
worked hands-on together since the '60s in custom home
design, drafting, consulting, plus building and repair in
every major trade. The e-book Home Design Standards - Home
Building Standards and the website
http://www.beforethearchitect.com are enterprises of Before
The Architect's principals.
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