Restoring Your Historic House
Scott T. Hanson, with photography by David J. Clough
Tilbury House Publishers, December 2019
Hardcover | 9-1/2 x 10-1/2 inches | 712 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0884484905 | $49.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
This book does not repeat basic information that is readily available in many standard DIY books about carpentry, wiring, and plumbing. Rather, it shows how to adapt those DIY skills to the specialized needs of a historic house.
Although there are other books about renovating old houses, this is the first that prioritizes the identification and preservation of the historic, character-defining features of a house as a starting point in the process. That is the purpose of this book: to describe and illustrate a best-practices approach for updating historic homes for modern life in ways that do not attempt to turn an old house into a new one. The book also suggests many ways to save money in the process, without settling for cheap or inappropriate solutions.
Scott Hanson is a historic-building preservation professional and has 40 years’ experience rehabilitating historic houses. He has illustrated this authoritative book with hundreds of step-by-step photos, illustrations, charts, and decision-making guides. Interspersed throughout are photo essays of 13 restored historic houses representing a range of periods and architectural styles: Italianate, Victorian, Queen Anne, Federal, Colonial, Colonial Revival, Greek Revival, Ranch, Adobe, Craftsman, Shingle, and Rustic. With interior and exterior photography by David Clough, these multi-page features show what can be achieved when a historic home is renovated with a desire to preserve or restore as much historic character as possible.
Scott T. Hanson has thought deeply about the renovation of historic homes in his 40 years as a designer, carpenter, municipal historic district regulator, historic preservation consultant, and architectural historian. Scott is Director of Preservation Consulting Services with Sutherland Conservation & Consulting and has researched and written numerous National Register nominations and Maine Historic Building Record documentation projects. David J. Clough is a lifelong lover of photography with a special passion for photographing structures of historical significance. His work has been published in Japan and the U.S. He lives in Rockland, Maine.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
I have no idea where to start with this book. I don't own a house, and the one I live in is far from historic. What is historic, anyways? Does this book only apply to homeowners of beauties like the Victorian house — now a bed and breakfast — on the cover? "For the purposes of this book," architect and author Scott T. Hanson explains in the first chapter, "a house [is] considered historic if it is fifty or more years old, is recognizably of that age, and is considered historic by its owner or potential owner." That definition opens up the realm of historic restoration from thousands of houses in the United States to millions of them. But, again, without a historic house of my own, where do I dig into a big 700-plus-page book with practical information accompanied by thousands of photographs and other illustrations? A homeowner undertaking such a restoration can flip to the index or a particular chapter to find information pertaining to a particular part of their house or an area of immediate concern. But this reference book is far from a cover-to-cover read and is therefore a bit overwhelming to this reviewer.
Well, since it's a book, let's start at the beginning. Following a chapter on "Finding the Right House" (where the above quote is taken from) is a hefty chapter of "Character-Defining Features of a Historic House." A couple-dozen house styles are explained through exterior photos keyed to a list of defining architectural features. A couple styles are highlighted in the spreads below, including Craftsman, which has a list of 15 features (low "bungalow" roof, shingle siding, dormers, etc.) that houses in that style share. While only a few features are present in the visual examples and some of the features actually negate each other — how many houses have both gable and hip roofs? — the plethora of examples do a good enough job in exuding the stylistic tendencies. And when it comes to the work of restoration, the highlighted features are the ones that need to be preserved in order to retain the qualities of the original.
The 65 pages of chapter two are a decent crash course in residential architectural styles, but what about the insides of buildings? After all, if you've ever watched a home improvement show that tackles houses that would fall into Hanson's definition of historic — my favorites in this vein are This Old House and Home Town — you know that the majority of the work is done on the inside. Such an emphasis is echoed in the book's structure: Besides "Project Planning," which encompasses the book's first 220 pages, the longest part of the book's six parts is part five, "Interior Finishes." (The other parts are "Under the Surface," "Systems," "The Exterior Envelope," and "Tools and Resources.") But if we consider home improvement shows to be aligned with the wishes of most homeowners in the US today, many of the character-defining features inside a historic house are obliterated in the embrace of open plans, the antithesis of the compartmentalized rooms of Victorian, Craftsman, and other pre-modern house styles. Kitchens are one area that has changed dramatically over the years, so accordingly Hanson spends many pages discussing kitchen designs. He doesn't argue for one approach over another (historic, modern, hybrid), but he does go into some depth on a kitchen he renovated, in which modern appliances and historic elements are combined to create a "compatible" kitchen. I agree that compatible is a good way of generally considering the insides of historic houses.
Interspersed between some of the book's twenty chapters are a baker's dozen of case studies; their bright white pages stand out subtly from the rest of the book's mottled backgrounds, which I mistakenly thought were ink stains when first opening the book. People who get this book and find themselves in a similar bind to me, in terms of not knowing where to start, should start with the case studies. Like the house styles, the case studies are loaded with photographs — outside and inside; historic, contemporary, and under construction — all of them accompanied by helpful captions. Unfortunately, with so many photos on a page and caption text that isn't much smaller than the paragraph text in the rest of the book, too many photos in the case studies are too small. Nevertheless, by spanning styles and time periods, most homeowners are bound to find a case study similar in vein to their own house; there's even a 1950s ranch house, the closest thing in the book to my childhood home. The case studies act like quick visual tours through the restoration work done on an individual house; they give readers an idea of what might be involved in their own house — and a template for tackling the highly detailed information presented in the rest of the book.
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