French Country House Plan: How To Get It Right And How To Go Wrong
French Country is a popular home design style today, both exterior and interior. This article addresses the design style of the French country house exterior.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
Do you think French Country, or Country French, is an interior design style? We would say: “Not exactly”.
French Country is a range of home design styles –
1. From an old French farmhouse to a not-so-French embassy
2. From residential design styles including but not limited to French Rustic, French Country, French Provincial, French Eclectic, Chateau (French version of the English manor house) and the French country of the same name.
3. Between Cajun style and Louisiana plantation style
4. From the time period in America in parentheses roughly by World War I and World War II
Comment: There is a kind of stylistic kinship with other home styles that are casually (and incorrectly) taken as singular and not as a set. For example, American Victorian is a/k/a (Victorian, in each case) 2nd Empire, Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, Folk, Stick, Shingle, and Richardsonian (Romanesque). Or, for example, Southern Colonial runs from Warburton House (1680) in James City County, VA or Christ’s Cross (a/k/a Cris Cross) (circa 1690) in New Kent County, VA and simpler , to Bacon’s Castle (1650) in Surry County, VA and Stratford Hall (1725) in Stratford, VA [noting that other examples abound either standing, or artistically captured earlier-on or reproduced, the author having chosen these for their geographical and temporal proximity, Post-Medieval English roots, and breadth of character].
You’ll find many publications about French Country on Amazon.com and at your local bookstore. Namely, along with a host of other design-oriented books, we ordered Provencal Inspiration: Living The French Country Spirit from Home Planners a while ago, and immediately received notice that Amazon is out of stock. French Country is back in a big way. As another more recent example, our newly completed French Country-style custom home plans for a property in Asheville, NC will be offered later this year at over $4 million. [and the facades really do have a rural sense to them].
The French Country style reminds us more than most of the Craftsman style: multiple roof slopes; windows of different sizes and heights; wide overhangs and soffits; knee pads and other building structure exposures; front gables; a combination of gable, clipped gable, shed and hip roofs; natural materials; exterior masonry, especially stone; a mixture of finishing coatings; restraint in exterior accessories and trim. The French Country style can be comfortable and attractive in its most relaxed presentations.
However, French country house design departs from the Arts and Crafts Movement in several respects: high, steeply pitched ceilings on slopes well above Craftsman’s; a refinement in the exterior finish particularly in the rakes; an underestimation of the observable structure; gutter systems sometimes with reinforced copper fittings; curved ceilings to accommodate steep slopes, larger windows, unperforated ceilings and interior walls; broad soffits; curved arches and dormers, elaborate ironwork; balconies; turrets; classical columns; masonry accessories in relief, a certain interest in symmetry, etc. Simplicity and elegance.
There are ways to mess up the design of a French country house, for example, keeping roof lines at a slope to ensure consistent depth of soffit and single level eaves, in the name of cheapness, ease and stylistically. insensitive; apply Corinthian columns instead of, say, Tuscan, or flute Tuscan columns; he confuses the French style with the English one, unbalances vertical and horizontal to favor the horizontal; do not place windows grouped in mullions, do not apply true French casement windows; use plastic shutters, make s-shaped shutters, do not apply true french doors, put asphalt shingles on the roof, insist on wide fascia and frieze boards, etc.
And there are ways to develop French country house plans through the use of contemporary technologies, including, for example, cost-effective cultured stone, particularly in its field-stone renderings, perhaps by Owens Corning; and through the use of art, such as AB Raingutters, Inc., Classic Gutter Systems, LLC half-round copper gutter systems, Charleston Lighting Company gas or electric light fixtures, or Southeastern wrought aluminum railing Architectural Metals, garage doors from Carriage House Door Company, and the like.
French Country Style encourages the application of design principles of excellent residential design, such as Creating a NEW OLD HOUSE: Yesterday’s Character for Today’s Home by Russell Versaci, The Taunton Press, 2003, and Patterns of Home : The Ten Essentials of Jacobson, Silverstein, and Winslow. Durable Design, The Taunton Press, Orig. 1941, reprint 2002; and, separately, sacred geometry. Again, you can either embrace and succeed or ignore and fail the design effort.
Take, for example, the layers and other arrangements of the finish coating, especially on steep gables. In the realm of Versaci’s stated or suggested age, it is the wise designer who specifies supposedly older (heavier looking) materials (field stone and the like) from grade down to, say, L1, and then some lighter material higher. Such an arrangement and layering would be particularly in keeping with the gable ends of steeper pitched roofs, which most likely would not originally be built 2 stories under tall, unbearable pitched roofs. That is, L2 should and would appear to be of a more recent vintage than L1, and presenting an age story without as much attention to detail is sending the gift horse back to the bags.
Finally, in the vernacular of Patterns of Home, again for example, the French country style lends itself easily to the creation of a patio, or “Creation of rooms, outside”, and the dormer space that demonstrates the design cues. of “Shelter and Perspective” under a “Protective Roof”, particularly if the roof lines are low-profile and clipped more simply at L2 than at L1.