French Country is a popular home design style today, both outside and inside. This article addresses the French country house design style on the outside.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Do you think French Country, or the Country French effect, is a home design style? We would say, “Not exactly.”

French Country is a range of home design styles:

1. From an old French farm to not a French embassy

2. From residential design styles, including but not limited to Rustic French, Country French, Provincial French, Eclectic French, Château (French version of the English manor house), and the homonymous French country.

3. From the intermediate Cajun style and the Louisiana Plantation style

4. From the period of time in America roughly delimited by World War I and World War II

Comment: There is a kind of stylistic kinship with other home styles that are taken casually (and incorrectly) as singular and not as a set. For example, the American Victorian style is a / k / a (Victorian, in each case) Second Empire, Gothic, Italian, Queen Anne, Folk, Stick, Tile, and Richardsonian (Romanesque). Or, for example, Southern Colonial spans 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 will find many publications about the French Country on Amazon.com and at your local bookstore. That is, along with a host of other design-oriented books, we asked a while ago for Provençal Inspiration: Living the French Country Spirit from Home Planners, and immediately received a notice that Amazon was unavailable. French Country is back in a big way. As another more recent example, our newly completed custom home plans in French country style for a property in Asheville, North Carolina will be offered later this year for more than $ 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 exhibitions of the building structure; front gables; a mixture of gabled, clipped gable, shed and hipped roofs; natural materials; exterior masonry, especially stone; a mixture of topcoats; restriction on accessories and exterior trim. The French country style can be comfortable and attractive in your more relaxed presentations.

However, French country house design departs from the Arts & Crafts movement in several respects: high-peaked roofs and steep slopes on slopes well above Craftsman; a refinement in the exterior trim, particularly in the rakes; an underestimation of the observable structure; gutter systems sometimes with ornate copper trim; curved roof lines to accommodate steep slopes, larger windows, non-perforated ceilings and interior walls; wide ceilings; arches and dormers with curved finials, elaborate hardware; balconies turrets Classic columns; relief masonry accessories, some interest in symmetry, etc. Simplicity and elegance.

There are ways to spoil the design of a French country house, for example, keeping the roof lines in one step to ensure a constant depth of the soffit and single-level eaves, in the name of cheap, easy and stylistically insensitive; apply Corinthian columns instead of, say, Tuscan, or flute Tuscan columns; confuse the French style with the English, unbalance the vertical and horizontal to favor the horizontal; no grouped windows with mullions, no true French casement windows apply; use plastic shutters, chase shutters, do not apply real French doors, put asphalt shingles on the roof, insist on wide facade boards and friezes, etc.

And there are ways to develop French country house plans using contemporary technologies, including, for example, profitable cultured stone, particularly in your country stone renderings, perhaps by Owens Corning; and using art, for example, semicircular copper gutter systems from AB Raingutters, Inc., Classic Gutter Systems, LLC, gas or electric fixtures from Charleston Lighting Company, or forged aluminum railing from Southeaster Architectural Metals, the garage doors from the Carriage House Door Company and the like.

The French country style encourages the application of design principles of excellent residential design, such as Russell Versaci’s Creating a NEW OLD HOUSE: The Character of Yesterday for Today’s Home, The Taunton Press, 2003, and Home Patterns by Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow: The Ten Essentials of Durable Design, The Taunton Press, orig. 1941, reprint 2002; and, separately, sacred geometry. Here again, you can hug and succeed or ignore and fail in the design effort.

Take, for example, layers and other trim siding arrangements, especially at the ends of steeply sloping gables. In the Versaci realm of appointed, or suggested age, it is the wise designer who specifies supposedly older and heavier (looking) materials – fieldstone and the like – from grade to, say, L1, and then some lighter material higher. Such an arrangement and layering would be particularly in keeping with the steeper sloping gable ends, which would most unlikely originally be 2 stories below the high and difficult to support roof pitches. That is to say, L2 should and would appear to be of a more recent vintage than L1, and to present a history of the age without as much attention to detail is to send the gift horse packing.

Finally, in the vernacular of Patterns of Home, again, for example, the French country style easily lends itself to creating a patio, or “Creating Rooms, Outside”, and to bedroom spaces that demonstrate the cornerstones of the “Shelter” design. and perspective “under a” Sheltering Roof “, especially if the roof lines are low profile and are more easily clipped at L2 than at L1.

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