THE BEAUTIFUL HOME HOUSE PLANS
The Beautiful Home house plans employ a module system (for the most part) not unlike the module system of Athens’ Parthenon, a system that is logical, simple, and direct. For more than two-thousand years, designers have employed the module system in design, not only in the Orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, et cetera) but in the formulation. You might consider module to be a pattern that creates something of a stressed rhythm, as in a song or in a verse, those rhythms that give pleasure to body and to mind.
There is economy in building by module, especially when the module conforms to standard materials in 2”x4” boards, 4’x8’ sheets, standard windows and doors. When modules are consistently governed and well measured our desire for order is pleased and our eye is easy. Too, there is surprise, but not as a mod would surprise by jarring shock, but by classical delight in something beautiful, some molding or pattern or pier. A gore movie shock shocks first time and is over, a bore; an ever blossoming beauty is a delight repeated in each sight.
In April, The Beautiful Home will begin offering measured, delightful, beautiful house plans in the classical pattern.
SMALL HOUSES
A small house need not be plain and poor. Small houses, if well designed, can be comfortable, convenient, and beautiful. The Beautiful Home offers a collection of vacation and second homes, starter and small family homes in styles that American homeowners traditionally favor, and these at an affordable price (2,000 gross-square-feet stock plan cost typically ranges from $1,175 to $2,300). These beautiful small homes incorporate proven strategies of storage, saving, and conservation into principles of beautiful design, convenience, and graceful living.
Good design pays in the short run and over time. Our beautiful small homes offer adaptations of building styles that stimulate sales by satisfying families. Given the choice, people choose beauty over plainness, ease over awkwardness, tradition over experiment (as house buying statics show). The Beautiful Small Home features pleasing, lovely homes that might snuggle atop a hill or be repeated by adaptation into a neighborhood of small houses, suitable to repetition and manufacture.
FAMILY HOUSES
The Beautiful Home pictures designs for every family type and each way of life: city and country, suburb and townhouse; simple house and elegant house, classical house and craftsman house; houses for desert, lake, and farm. These many houses for many families have one thing in common: good design.
Each house respects its place, its purpose, and the family that lives in it. The families might include a suburban mom and a dad and two children; a city family of five children with grandparents; a husband and wife just married and building a life in a town; or, an older couple or a single person retired to that dream of life at the ocean. There is no single family type, nor is there a single, universal house plan; instead, there is the common desire for comfort, ease, affordability, and beauty. The Beautiful Family Home grows into the family that lives within it.
ESTATES
A house is not merely a home, a house is often a family’s greatest investment, its foundation, a stability that allows success and growth. The estate is not merely a house, it is architecture, sometimes great architecture, the wealth of a nation. These beautiful houses are often a family’s estate, fine architecture, a paradigm of house style and type – styles and types most likely to create wealth and build value. Through The Beautiful Home a family might acquire the finest house examples from the best historic periods, updated for contemporary living.
A Beautiful Estate might indulge fantasy, satisfy the necessities of the few, or be suitable to you. The Beautiful Home house plans feature traditional architectural virtues modernized with technological wonders that create the ideal American home.
INTERIORS
There is a proportion to rooms that determines scale, ornament, and the patterns and the rhythms of good design. When understood, these patterns can be employed to create comfort, formal restraint, ease, and sometimes, an almost exquisite beauty. The rules of proportion are easily understood, and when understood, scale, ornament, and decoration naturally follow. The Beautiful Home house plans often guide readers through lovely rooms in easy drawings. Structure, elements, tradition, furnishings, application, interior design is succinctly considered.
GARDENS
A garden is a place of earthly delights composed to satisfy our need for proportion, pleasure, and fantasy. Gardens can be practical arrangements of flowers or vegetables, and gardens can be impractical follies or theatres of fun. The Beautiful Garden explores the union of nature and man in all its varied magnificence. Occasionally, gardens are suggested in house plans. Always, garden designs can be requested.
STOCK HOUSE PLANS
House plans are each month added to The Beautiful Home. These houses are organized by style, period, type, et cetera. There are hundreds of plans available, though only those plans featured in the monthly magazines are shown. Why? Because the published plans are intended to give context to the great story of The American Home, and because the author has no more time in the day than do you.
Eventually, there will be houses in every major American style and regional period. These first houses correspond to the styles and periods of “Home a History”, the television program now in final stages of production. As you have seen, The Beautiful Home house plans are meticulously drawn in plan and elevation; placed in historical and regional context; highlighted by identifying characteristics of style and period; appreciated and described with information about the particulars of each home.
The History of Civilization is, in no small measure, the History of the House, of how we live in houses, and in what houses make of us. The house may change in material, shape, and size, but the house does not change in its purpose to provide shelter and to serve life’s necessities. Our necessities have grown from hut to farm, from farm to town to city at differing paces through quickly changing times, and our houses have adapted to our needs.
As has been said, “The story of the American Dream is seen in the history of the American Home”, and each house tells the story. The Beautiful Home offers to you and to your family houses in the best traditions of the American Home.
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Featured image: The Five Orders of Architecture, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, 1593. credit: Viktoryia
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