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AMERICAN PIEDMONT CUSTOM HOME DESIGN
À la recherche du temps d'existant. AG
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American Piedmont is a home design style?
Right? It's not a place, e. g., Georgia Piedmont or The Piedmont. It's a home design style. And, at that, it's a flexible home design style, adaptable.
Really?
AG and The Missus didn’t know that for 40 years and more in the biz. Piedmont blues and food – chicken, slaw, beef, and more, more, more – OK. But Piedmont home design? Nay, American Piedmont Style home design.
Then cometh Stephen Fuller Incorporated in a home design style guide to help home designers, including Before The Architect (BTA), with conformance standards in presenting exteriors of to-be-builts in a planned community, The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, south of Asheville, NC. In the Architectural and Construction Guidelines for the project, it is writ on p. 31 . . .
The eastern region of the United States where the foothills begin is a region commonly referred to as the Piedmont region. What is referred to as the Piedmont Style, [sic] is not based on specific historical precedent. Rather, it is a mix of materials, forms and details commonly found in this region, woven together to respond to more functionally designed homes of today.
Slip “American” in front of Piedmont Style, and the confection’s conviction is commonly, conversationally countenanced.
Well, almost.
This style obliges grouping Anglo- and Franco-exterior elements and features with cottagelike looks and materials in low-mid sloping (to 1:12 APX) 1-, 1 ½-, and partial 2-story configurations. Of quizzical interest, a front-facing, windowed, 2nd-story blind gable, wall dormer, or roof dormer seems all but a design gotta-do.
Nope, not one whit about interiors.
How this exterior blending is “to respond to more functionally designed homes of today” this author leaves to the delusive divinations of greater minds. Response from what? How’d they do that?
Now, having had some fun with the formative fiction of American Piedmont Style, there’s more good than bad to be made of it.
For one, the disclosure puts a name to a range of exterior formats that Before The Architect had seen for some time, the designations of which style heretofore varied from vague to vacuous. To exemplify, the first time in current memory that BTA’s desktop was crossed by such an exterior presentation was 2007. A home design with no name. Since, others. (Noting that the Fuller depiction was published in 2003, the progenitor of a name for a hitherto nameless home design style may be now named to all and sundry. Drum roll.)
For two, BTA’s clients tend toward cottagelike appearances and are almost to a person most fond of English, French, and some coastal, central-to-western Mediterranean home designing.
For three, in this custom home designer’s opinion, “All hail, American Piedmont.” Within bounds of common sense and other cherished shibboleths and other signposts on the home design pathway, American Piedmont can flex without foul. By the principal of its patriarchy, do what you will on the interior; and do what you can on the exterior to Englishify, Frenchify, or otherify to satisfy interest and need both to the exterior per se and its introduction to or otherwise reflection of the interior’s design.
Dare not ye runneth off wild-eyed and wiggy. There are limits to custom home design signatures herewith.
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Not full 2-story all ‘round. |
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Local, earthy materials (of seemingly so) for finish clad, e.g., not shiplapped, bricked, etc. |
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At least stone lowers. |
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Stone site walls. |
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Heavy-up on trim, without most of the frou (hard to avoid those clichéd, fleur-de-lislike raking cornice trim peak pieces, don’t you know?) – e.g., lumbered shutters, timbered butts. |
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Mix gable and hip ridging, flared or no. |
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Symmetry is not a watchword – be thee relaxed, not rigorous and rigid. |
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Biggish main entry door. |
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Double-hung and casement, etc. – not picture. |
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Mullions, not mulls. |
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Mix up linear and curvilinear arches. |
Two examples follow this week in Front Of House elevations only: one, a Craftsmanified American Piedmont exterior; two, a Tuscanified American Piedmont exterior. In each case, the interior is to be correctly presented as to respective home design style; therefore, while the exteriors are neither one nor the other – neither Craftsman nor Tuscan – there are respectful home design representations, or associations, of each in both elements and features.
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