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Description
Home owners, history and architecture buffs, and visitors to the Pacific Northwest will all find a treasure trove of information within these pages. With 300 photographs and illustrations, both historic and contemporary, this text provides a comprehensive overview of the city's major residential architectural styles, including Victorian, Craftsman, Tudor Revival, and Modern. The homes featured range from the showplaces of the wealthy to humble cottages and bungalows in residential neighborhoods. Beginning with a historical overview and continuing through descriptions of the 120 featured houses, organized by chronological era, this is the first-ever comprehensive guide to Seattle's historic homes. Checklists of houses by neighborhood and style make this useful for walking tours by residents and visitors alike. Anyone interested in preserving Seattle's architectural treasures will find this an essential resource. Classic Houses of Seattle is a vibrant portrait of the city's development, an important chapter in the story of American residential architecture.… (more)
User reviews
Despite all this, the book has somehow raised my hackles slightly. Maybe it's just the competitive crankiness that comes from living in and loving the lesser-celebrated of two cities which are much compared, but when I look at the (mostly) grand houses described in this book and consider where they might be located, I think of Portland and not Seattle. In my mind, Seattle's housing is best characterized by vast and now-dingy tracts of as-small-as-possible houses, with no dining rooms and no basements, erected in haste to contain wartime workers and the many other folks who streamed into the city in the 1940s and 1950s (Seattle's population grew by 190,000 people in that time!).
But nothing smacks of small-minded provincialism more than a tendency to deride other cities as a way of championing my own, so I shall quit before I walk any further down that road.
I will leave you with this: Classic Houses of Seattle is a lovely picture book, useful for anyone interested in 20th century domestic architecture. It provides substantive and interesting information supplemental to its illustrations. But it focuses too much on the highfalutin and the expensive -- the book has no substantive discussion of those as-small-as-possible houses with no basements, though I would argue that they, also, are classic Seattle. However, the pictures are still pretty, the supplemental matter and how-to-research information are still invaluable, and Classic Houses does provide a nice, if slanted, introduction to a portion of Seattle's material history.