Storybook Homes

The path towards thinking of building a castle has been winding with a few stops at different ideas along the way, and my better half and I have looked at several styles and types of buildings and thought they were the all the "Cat's Meow" at the time. We both think old houses (read 75+ years) are great, they have character that the modern suburban cookie cutter homes lack. After owning an old house though, one quickly realizes all of the work that must be done to keep it up or fix it. There's a couple of times I've thought it would be easier to tear the house down and rebuild it than to fix some issues it had. Needless to say, we probably won't want another one...

We also took and interest in earth-sheltered homes. They're incredibly efficient, blend in with the landscape, and there's lots of DIY info out there on how to build one on a very tight budget. The efficiency comes partly from using the Earth's roughly 57F constant to shelter the building from any temperature extremes in the environment, and the often thick walls of an earth-sheltered home act as thermal mass to shield the interior from the temperature swings as well. It may come to pass that one of these gets built as a home first and a bigger structure gets built while we live in the smaller building. An earth-sheltered home can look like anything you want, from super modern to "Hobbit"-like.

Along the lines of the older homes, we also like "Storybook" homes. There was a brief run in the popularity of this style of home that peaked around the 1920s. They were generally smaller buildings that incorporated any combination of castle, cottage or even Tudor architecture to give it a look like it belongs in a fairy tale. The original homes are very desirable to this day an can be found in many places around the country, though they tend to cluster in urban areas. Storybookers.com is a great site to get more information and to see some examples of these homes. There is also a modern business selling plans for their version of storybook homes, the site is storybookhomes.biz. We purchased both elevation/description books from the site for ideas. They tend to lean towards the Cotswold cottage style, and some of the plans look more palatial than cottage-like, but it's really neat stuff to look at. Honestly, to build one of storybookhomes.biz's homes would cost a fortune due to all of the architectural details unless you built it yourself. The only thing that I didn't care for was that the layout of the rooms in the plan was completely modern; in other words, when you got inside the home you'd feel like you were in any other modern home and that, to me, seems to detract from the whole cottage or storybook feel that you would be trying to create with a building like this; but that's just my opinion, and that design may be exactly what some folks want. At any rate, both sites are worth looking at for enjoyment or inspiration, and the storybookhomes.biz has some link resources leading to specialized hardware or tradesmen that could be interesting.

(The picture is from the storybookhomes.biz site)