The Vintage House: A Guide to Successful Renovations and Additions - By: Mark Alan Hewitt and Gordon Bock - Old Home Restoration

Featured Architectural Firms

vintagehouse — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:45:14 +0000

The following is a list of architects and and architectural firms working in the areas of new design or who work on existing old buildings that have contributed to this book.

Albert, Righter & Tittmann Architects, Inc.
262 Washington St.
Boston, MA 02108
www.alriti.com

Stern and Bucek Architects
1610 Commerce St.
Houston, TX 77002
www.sternbucek.com

Zivkovic Connolly Architects PC
511 West 25th Ste. 201
New York, NY 10001
www.zivarch.com

Cusano Associates
5 Wilson St.
Mendham, NJ 07945
www.cusanoassociates.com

Fairfax & Sammons Architecture
67 Gansevoort St.
New York, NY 10014
www.fairfaxandsammons.com

Mark P. Finlay Architects, AIA
96 Old Post Rd. Ste. 200
Southport, CT 06890
www.markfinlay.com

Allan Greenberg Architect
1050 Thomas Jefferson St. NW
Washington, DC 20007
www.allangreenberg.com

Grenfell Architecture
910 Seventeenth St. NW Ste. 1090
Washington, DC 20006
www.grenfellarchitecture.com

Mark Alan Hewitt Architects
114 Claremont Rd.
Bernardsville, NJ 07924
www.maharchitect.com

Kennedy-Grant Architecture
35 Mill St.
Bernardsville, NJ 07924
www.kennedygrantarchitecture.com

Voith & Mactavish Architects LLP
1616 Walnut St. 24th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103
www.voithandmactavish.com

The Johnson Partnership
1212 NE 65th St.
Seattle, WA 98115
www.tjp.us

John Milner Architects, Inc.
104 Lakeview Drive.
Chadds Ford, PA 19137
www.johnmilnerarchitects.com

John B. Murray Architect LLC
48 West 37th St. 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10018
www.jbmarchitect.com

Peter Pennoyer Architect
432 Park Avenue South, 11th Fl.
New York, NY 10016
www.ppapc.com

Thomas Norman Rajkovich, Architect
518-526 Davis St. Ste. 206
Evanston, IL 60201
www.tnr-arch.com

G.P. Shafer Architect, PC
270 Lafayette St. Ste. 1302
New York, NY 10012
www.gpshafer.com

Hilland Hall Turner Architects
47 Mine Brook Rd.
Bernardsville, NJ 07924
www.hhta.com

Wright & Robinson
63 Adams Place
Glen Ridge, NJ 07028
www.wright-robinson-architects.com

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

vintagehouse — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:51:56 +0000

Come see Mark in person at:

Knoxville, TN February 2011

The Bookworm, 99 Claremont Rd. Bernardsville, NJ June 22, 4-6PM

Archivia Books, 993 Lexington Ave (71st and 72nd), New York, NY July 13, 6-8 PM (www.archivia.com) OFFICIAL Vintage House book launch and signing. RSVP at 212-570-9565; info@archivia.com

Mendham Books, Mendham, NJ TBA

Rejuvenation Lighting and Hardware , Seattle Store Mid-August, 2011 (www.rejuvenation.com)

Craftsman Weekend 20th Anniversary, Pasadena, CA October 15, 1-2PM (www.Pasadenaheritage.org)

Come see Gordon in person at:

Montgomery County DAR Silver Spring, MD March 19, 2011

Historic Frederick Preservation Awards Frederick, MD May 4, 2011

Archivia Books, 993 Lexington Ave. (71st and 72nd), New York, NY, July 13, 6-8PM; www.archivia.com OFFICIAL Vintage House launch and book signing; RSVP at 212-570-9565; info@archivia.com

Craftsman Weekend 20th Anniversary, Pasadena, CA October 15, 1-2 PM (www.pasadenaheritage.org)

Nosing Around the Snout House

vintagehouse — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:28:29 +0000

One of my heroes in the world of words is the late William Safire, whose “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine put the names, expressions, and locutions of daily parlance under his keen weekly scrutiny. Inspired by his example, I have long kept a list new labels and pseudoterms that find bubbling up into the working vocabulary of building and design, and given the wealth of “goodies”, I thought from time-to-time I’d present them here.

A building trend that puts the cart before the horse, architecturally speaking, is the so-called snout house – a house appended to a garage, rather than the other way around. While attached garages are neither novel nor inherently offensive, what makes the snout house so noxious in some cases is its in-your-face orientation. Invariably, the garage not only faces the street (the better to make the shortest possible driveway distance), but also dominates the house by jutting out from the main facade to make the eponymous ‘snout’. Appearing in both new construction and remodeling – and well-rooted in Canada as well as across the U.S. — snout houses have become ubiquitous to the point of being infamous, especially when they harbor today’s multi-car garages.

Like many of today’s architecturally ravaging practices, the snout house seems to be the unfortunate offspring of the recent building boom economy crossed with modern building codes. A couple generations ago, the customary place to find a garage was as a freestanding building behind the main house, usually sited at a back corner of the property and close to the lot line. Such a layout however, requires devoting considerable turf to a driveway and often siting the house off-center on the lot. Since these luxuries have no payback for builders of modestly priced developments, over the past 15 years the common alternative has been to eliminate the long driveway — which allows building on narrow lots with minimal clearance — and then graft the garage onto the main facade as a two- or three-car appendage

Taken to its limit, the negative impact of the snout house is most obvious when seen in plan or from an airplane. In fact, in her book A Field Guide to Sprawl, Dolores Hayden offers an aerial photograph of typical snout house neighborhood: a phalanx of long, narrow houses packed cheek by jowl with attached garages all but taking over the front yards. Aesthetics aside, the practical complaints about snout houses are that, in a such a block, the extended multiple fingers of garages make it difficult to watch children playing with neighbors — even hard to find the front doors of individual residences.

Whomever coined this clever term has yet to be identified, but citations in print go back to a 1996 mention in the Portland Oregonian. Indeed, the PDX city has long been ground zero for anti-snout house sentiment, going so far as to regulate their construction in 1999. Though a reporter for the New York Times called the move an example of “ever-quirky” Portland, since then cities like Gainesville, Florida, have followed its lead.