A Place to Call Home: Tradition, Style, and Memory in the New American House

From the author of The Great American House, a stunning new book on the power of place

In his best-selling first book, Gil Schafer explored the qualities that make a house a home—architecture, landscape, and decoration. In his eagerly awaited second book, Schafer shows how traditional and classical principles can blend with a sense of place to create beautifully realized homes in a range of styles, all with the satisfying tensions of fancy and simple, past and present.

In part one, Schafer shares his essential tool kit for building a house that succeeds in both craft and emotion: from how to read the landscape to incorporating memory to learning how to balance both fancy and simple elements. In part two, he presents seven homes in depth, including an apartment with a view of Central Park, a hillside cottage in Northern California, an updated Connecticut Colonial on a large farm, an Adirondacks camp on Lake Placid, and a stunning A-frame on the coast of Maine. While each is unique, all the homes are beautifully livable, at ease on the land they occupy, in style, scale, and materials: models that readers will want to emulate in their own homes.