The Pace of home sales at California new-home communities was extraordinarily slow in October, primarily due to the global credit crisis, according to a recent California Building Industry Association report.
The monthly CBIA/Hanley Wood Market Intelligence (HWMI) New Home Sales and Pricing Report showed that new home sales in October were 63 percent below October 2007. [...]

Sometimes called the California ranch style, this home in the Modern family, originated here in 1930s. It emerged as one of the most popular American styles in the 1950s and 60s, when the automobile had replaced early 20th-century forms of transportation, such as streetcars.

Now mobile homebuyers could move to the suburbs into bigger homes on [...]

America’s colonial period encompassed a number of housing types and styles, including Cape Cod, Saltbox, Georgian, and Dutch Colonial. However, when we speak of the Colonial style, we often are referring to a rectangular, symmetrical home with bedrooms on the second floor. The double-hung windows usually have many small, equally sized square panes. During the [...]

This architecture was popular in the 1920s and 1930s and continues to be a mainstay in suburbs across the United States. The defining characteristics are half-timbering on bay windows and upper floors, and facades that are dominated by one or more steeply pitched cross gables. Patterned brick or stone walls are common, as are rounded [...]

Tradition has it that if you fire a shotgun through the front doorway of this long, narrow home, the bullet will exit directly through the back door. The Shotgun style is characterized by a single story with a gabled roof. Shotguns are usually only one room wide, with each room leading directly into the next. [...]

Some of the first houses built in the United States were Cape Cods. The original colonial Cape Cod homes were shingle-sided, one-story cottages with no dormers. During the mid-20th century, the small, uncomplicated Cape Cod shape became popular in suburban developments. A 20th-century Cape Cod is square or rectangular with one or one-and-a-half stories and [...]

The style, often called the California Bungalow, was most popular between 1900 and 1920 and evolved into the Craftsman movement. An offshoot, the Chicago Bungalow, appeared in the Midwest, also in the early part of the century. It’s characterized by few material details, an offset entryway, and a projecting bay on the facade.
An offshoot of [...]

A well-publicized, world-class event can inspire fashion for years. At least that’s the case with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which showcased cutting-edge classical buildings that architects around the country emulated in their own residential and commercial designs. The Neoclassical style remained popular through the 1950s in incarnations from one-story cottages to multilevel [...]

Victorian architecture dates from the second half of the 19th century, when America was exploring new approaches to building and design. There are a variety of Victorian styles, including Second Empire, Italianate, Stick, and Queen Anne. Advancements in machine technology meant that Victorian-era builders could easily incorporate mass-produced ornamentation such as brackets, spindles, and patterned [...]

Due to the many diffent architecural styles used in the building of homes in Southern California over the past 200 years, and the numerous questions I receive each day related to them, each week I’ll define one specific style of architecture. My hope is that this will provide you with a better understanding of the [...]