Building With Style: Traditional Styles Modern Needs

In a good design, everything must work together toward a common end. Some very inventive designers work out a unique style for themselves, but most rely on inspiration from the past. In this column, I want to explore how designers can use stylistic traditions from the past for their own purposes. Our choice of styles is usually limited by strong local preferences. Colonial in the Northeast, brick vernacular in the Midwest, adobe in the Southwest, etc. But there is some choice in every market. For a custom home unconstrained by subdivision controls, the choice is very broad indeed. By and large, our popular, everyday styles are no longer “alive” — that is, part of an unbroken local tradition reaching