Customer Reviews

100 Turn-of-the-Century Brick Bungalows with Floor Plans (Dover Architecture)

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It is interesting to compare the home plans in this book to the homes of today. The houses in the plans are smaller and most only have one bathroom but they have a charming details that is hard to find in the oversized "McMansions" that are being built today. Unless you are planning on faithfully recreating a house from the early 1900's this book is probably going to most useful as a source of inspiration and good ideas.

As my husband and I look toward retirement, we are dreaming of the kind of house we will be looking for, or building, when we move. I have always loved the bungalow style for its coziness and nostalgic feeling. This book is full of bungalow concepts, all drawn from a magazine-sponsored contest in the early 1900's for plans for a brick bungalow for $3000. If you buy this book, be sure to get out your magnifying glass so you can read the designers'/architects' comments -- they are very funny! One said that if you think you can actually build a brick bungalow for $3000, you should plan on a thatched roof! I love this book and have perused it, and dreamed over it, many times. I have lots of ad-hoc bookmarks (like, corners torn from the newspaper or discarded mail!) stuck in at floor plans I like. There is a brick marketing "story" in the back of the book that is wonderful of its type.

This book is great. Break out the magnifying glass, some of the printing is really small. My only complaint is the house plans are from people mostly on the east coast, so they don't quite fit what people from the west coast would call "Bungalows". There's really only 1 plan in there that looks like a California bungalow. But, the book is full of creative plans that would be very comfortable small homes.

The sketches and floor plans are a little hard to read by modern standards, as all are hand-lettered, and the designs are a little light on bathrooms, to say nothing of garages, compared to contemporary homes. But the homes are very Picturesque nonetheless, featuring plenty of faux thatched roofs, chimneys, eyebrow dormers, arched entryways, porches and so forth.