Using A Field Guide To American Houses in the Real World
The McAlesters' A Field Guide To American Houses is the thing every preservation consultant, historic district commission member, and tired contractor keeps under their arm when they need to figure out what they're dealing with. First published in 1984 and revised in 2013, it covers basically every residential architectural style that exists in the United States, organized in a way that actually works when you're standing on a porch at 7 AM trying to diagnose a 1920s bungalow that has been re-sided three times. It is not a coffee table book. The photos are documentation photos, not aspirational ones. Each style entry gives you the date range, the key identifying features, the common materials, and the typical alterations that have been made over the decades. The trick most people miss is the cross-referencing system. If you are looking at a house and you think it might be Folk Victorian but you are not sure, the index will point you to the stylistic overlap sections where the author discusses the features that separate it from other closely related styles. That indexing alone is worth the price of the book. I once spent a Saturday afternoon with a homeowner in Ohio who was convinced her house was a Queen Anne because of the wraparound porch and the decorative shingles. The field guide entry for Queen Anne immediately flagged that wraparound porches were actually a Craftsman Bungalow convention in many regions, and the decorative shingle pattern did not match the typical fish-scale or geometric patterns of the Queen Anne period. The house turned out to be a Prairie-style cottage with later porch additions. Without that cross-referencing step, we would have gone down the wrong rabbit hole for another hour.
How to Use It Efficiently
Start by looking at the date range. Most style misidentification happens because people skip the chronology and go straight for the ornament. A house with spindlework can be Queen Anne, Folk Victorian, or Craftsman depending on the date and the other features present. The book puts dates front and center for each style, which forces you to establish a timeframe before you get seduced by decorative details. Next, check the roof shape and massing. The McAlesters organize their entries so that roof form comes early in the description for good reason. A steeply pitched gable with exposed rafters means something very different from a low-pitched hip with wide eaves, even if both houses have similar window patterns. I keep the illustrated index at the front open on my clipboard during site visits because flipping through the full entries every time is too slow when you have twelve houses to evaluate in a morning. The material section within each entry is where most people underinvest their reading time. The distinction between stick-style framing on a 1880s house and the mill-work on a 1905 bungalow is mostly in the material treatment, and the book describes this with enough specificity that you can tell the difference on a walk-through without pulling out a tape measure for everything.
A Problem That Comes Up Regularly
Altered facades. You will encounter houses where the original entrance has been moved, windows replaced with vinyl units, and the porch columns swapped for square posts. The field guide helps here because the interior layout descriptions and the foundation clues often survive even when the exterior has been thoroughly modernized. I worked on a project in Michigan where the entire front facade had been re-clad in aluminum siding and the original front door had been replaced. The roof pitch and window spacing inside the siding matched the Craftsman Bungalow entry exactly, and the rear elevation still showed the original brick piers. That rear elevation saved the designation process. The workaround I use when a house is too altered to match cleanly is to work backward from the remaining original features rather than forward from what you think the style should look like. Identify the intact elements first, then use the field guide to see which style entry those elements cluster around. It is slower but it prevents you from forcing a square peg into a round style box.
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Where the Book Falls Short
Regional variation gets compressed. The book covers American houses broadly, which means a Cape Cod in Massachusetts and a Cape Cod in coastal California look the same on paper but are built differently in practice. The Florida casita tradition, for example, does not get the detailed treatment it deserves, and Gulf Coast shotgun houses are covered briefly compared to their Midwest counterparts. If you are working outside the central and eastern United States, you will need a regional supplement. The 2013 revision added sections on postwar styles and contemporary homes, but the coverage still skews toward pre-1940 construction. Mid-century modern homes, especially the tract-built variations that dominate suburbs from California to Texas, get far less attention than Craftsman or Colonial Revival homes. If your work involves properties built between 1945 and 1970, you will find yourself using the field guide for context rather than as your primary identification tool. There is also the issue of cost. The hardcover runs around sixty dollars and the paperback is cheaper but less durable in the field. A digital version exists through various book retailers, but the photo quality degrades significantly on a phone screen, which makes it harder to compare detail shots against actual houses in the field. I keep a worn paperback in my truck and a hardcover at my desk. The paperback has dog-eared pages at the Craftsman, Colonial Revival, and Folk Victorian sections because those are the styles I encounter most often.
The Practical Takeaway
Buy the book. Keep it in a place where you can grab it without thinking. The real value comes from using it repeatedly until the style descriptions become second nature, at which point you will barely need to open it anymore. You will know a Shingle Style from a Norman-style cottage by the massing alone. That transfer of knowledge from the page to your instincts is what makes this guide useful beyond just being a reference shelf item. For the full list of available editions and purchase options, check major book retailers and the publisher catalog. The McAlesters have done the work of making architectural identification practical rather than academic, and that effort shows up every time you need to quickly and accurately name a house style in the field.
