Architect Russell Versaci’s latest project is something of a prequel to his 2003 release, Creating a New Old House (The Taunton Press, $40). The settlers of long ago were also the home builders and artisans who brought traditional construction methods to the New World and creatively translated their traditions to the topography, climate, and raw materials of America.
In Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House (The Taunton Press, $45), available in October, Versaci looks at this lineage and peels back the layers of influence for a beautiful and engaging look at the places we call home. With archival images, maps, and definitions sprinkled among lush new photographs by Erik Kvalsvik, this is a coffee table book with a larger mission.
Southern Accents: Your previous book, in which you tackle the concept of building houses that adhere to traditional design principles, really resonated with readers. What is it about old houses that intrigues us so?
Russell Versaci: Old houses remind us of a time when life was simpler, less stressful, of places we lived in or visited where we felt safe and cared for. I think of them as grandmothers’ houses. Because we yearn to feel secure and connected again in a shifting world, we are drawn to old houses and the feelings they evoke.
You identify “colonial cradles of home,” places that each nurtured a distinctive house form. Half are in the South. Since these are often house forms with which we’re already familiar, do you find Southerners have a special affinity for your approach to building? And if we’re attracted to the look, how can we steer clear of faux traditionalism?
Tradition has never been forgotten in the South. The old architectural forms are alive and well here because we revere our
heritage as a living tradition rather than a dead end. We are drawn to the styles we know and love through memory and experience,
and we are continually updating them for life in the present day. If a new house has traditional details that are not native
to our area, that don’t serve a purpose, or that seem arbitrarily added, then it is not authentic, not traditional. We know a fraud when we see
it but are often unable to explain exactly why. Knowing our region’s building customs and elements of style makes us more discerning.
Maybe one of the biggest surprises is your debunking of the myth of the log cabin’s frontier origins. You trace it back to the medieval cottages of Scandinavia. How did you discover this?
Roots of Home required huge amounts of research to tease out the details of early building styles and ground them in the story of our country’s founding. Working backward, we found that the iconic log cabin was adopted by William Penn for his Pennsylvania colonists from the short-lived colony of New Sweden in southern New Jersey and Delaware. There, the first log cabins had been built by settlers from the heavily forested areas of Sweden and Finland, where people had been building log houses for centuries. Each American tradition has built on a previous one, mostly imported from the Old World, and only a few have emerged independently. These connections are what is so intriguing about America’s story of home.
