What better place to start exploring America's traditional styles than Colonial Williamsburg? Well, arguably there are better places, but Colonial Williamsburg offers such an abundance in such a small area that is certainly ONE excellent place to start. I won't go into the history of the place here. There are enough sources for that. In this post I will just look at a single example, the St. George Tucker House.
In 1788 St. George Tucker moved a simple 1 1/2 story structure from the east side of the Palace Green to its current location and over the next 10 years expanded it in pieces, to the home we see today. The St. George Tucker house plan beautifully reflects this natural growth, the growth of a family over time, with new children arriving, the growth in prosperity of the family as St. George Tucker achieved more and more prominence professionally. (St. George Tucker was a lawyer and a professor of Law at the College of William and Mary in Colonial Williamsburg.)
The growth of the plan also reveals the hierarchy of activities in a home of this period. Quarters for servants, and the activities related to cooking, where separated from the main reception rooms. In this case, they are found at the far western (left) end of the linear plan. This isolation served several purposes. Most importantly, it protected the main part of the house from potential house fires, which often originated in kitchens. In fact, it was common at this time to build kitchens in completely separate buildings.
The provision of a narrow staircase next to the kitchen enabled St. George Tucker's servants to go about their household duties without disturbing the family, who lived in the central portion of the house. By studying a plan in this way we learn so much about how daily life was lived at the time this house was built.
The kitchen wing is connected to what might have been at one time a breezeway, a further protection from fire. The next room, moving eastward from the kitchen, is the Dining Room. A separate room for dining only became common in the 1700s. Until that time meals were usually taken at small tables set up in the main reception rooms. In fact this was typical of the specialization of room functions such as libraries and even bedrooms.
In the St. George Tucker house the Dining Room serves as an almost graphic link between the servants/kitchen wing and the main house. Its floor height rises several steps above the kitchen, to match the main house and its ceiling is higher as well, giving it proportions more in line with the main house. Notice on the elevation how the kitchen floor level (at the left end) is close to the ground while the Dining Room, to its right is higher, with taller windows reflecting the higher ceiling height.
Continuing eastward we come to the main house, an interesting variation on the 4x4 plan. (I'll publish one of those in my next post.) Here the entry hall in the center, flanked by smaller reception rooms on each side, leads to a large reception room ("great hall" on the floor plan) that stretches the lengthwise across the north side of the main house block.
The main block of the house rises to a full two stories. Thus the elevations clearly define this as the center of the home. The additional height of this section does more than just express the social hierarchy of the family structure. The height also allows for larger scaled rooms, with higher ceilings, taller windows, more natural light. Throughout the St. George Tucker house a variety of room sizes, shapes and scales accommodate a wide range of activities, with smaller spaces for studying, sleeping or working, larger spaces for social gatherings, rooms facing in different directions to take advantage of natural light at different times of day, or different orientations to accommodate the changing seasons.
All this is accomplished with the simple design elements of a wood framed and sided colonial architectural language, having its aesthetic roots in Palladian classicism, and its expression in the materials and simple technologies available to the builders of the late 1700s Virginia.
Drawings of the St. George Tucker house are in the collection of the Library of Congress. I have made copies of these drawings available more readily to the public by arranging to have them printed on large format architectural sheets, "blueprints". I have these for sale on eBay. Please visit my eBay seller profile page and you will find a link to all the drawings I currently have for sale. These included the St. George Tucker house as well as other Colonial Williamsburg buildings. In addition to these I have drawings of a great number of other periods available, such as Prairie Style homes, Victorian homes, and bungalows. I am currently in the process of building a sister site to this one, HistoricHomePlans.net. In this site I will be providing more information, more drawings, more photos, of all these beautiful American homes. In time I will also be adding my own designs inspired by these historic examples, including full construction sets. I hope you will all visit that site in the future.
Questions and comments are welcome, so please feel free to write. However, to eliminate spam I DO moderate comments and review them before they are posted.
Peace, happiness and good health to you all.
Antonio
