Customer Reviews

1000 Turn-of-the-Century Houses: With Illustrations and Floor Plans (Dover Architecture)

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This collection of plans, originally published in 1910, could literally provide housing for an entire small town. Here you'll find starter cottages with one or two bedrooms, mansions with seven or eight, corner-turreted Victorians, double and two-family houses, Dutch Colonials, foursquares, bungalows (as we'd call them today), and even back-yard stables and commercial buildings with storefronts at grade and apartments above. Most have bathrooms and many would be quite suitable for homeowners of today, with even the common "servant's" or "girl's" room converted to a large bath or the ubiquitous home office. As is a common weakness of Dover reprints (exacerbated by the arrangement of the book, with four of the author's original pages to each leaf), you'll really need a magnifier for a decent look at the illustrations, but for house-historians, preservationists, and people who just love old architecture, it's a treasure trove.

This could have been a very interesting book if the plans weren't so small. I always have enjoyed looking at floorplan books but even with a magnifying glass a lot of them were hard to see. Also, There was no mention of the square footage of the house so I sent it back.

Interesting and useful reference for cottages, bungalow, etc from around the time of 1900. Many (but not all) aesthetically pleasing architectural examples. I found it very worthwhile.