Classic Journey Houses of Ken Tate

Award-winning architect Ken Tate is widely recognized for his intuitive approach to traditional architecture. His houses come from a place of soul, as well as a deep understanding of human nature and the history of architecture. In this book, nine dwellings ranging in influence from Norman farmhouses, Spanish estancias, Mediterranean villas, and Federal and Greek Revival houses reveal the breadth of his skilll and imagination. While some of these offer faithful representations of historic styles, others marry elements from several periods to give the impression that they grew and changed over time. By using authentic materials including custom-quarried stone, antique wooden beams, and natural plaster, and employing traditional craftsmanship ranging from mortis-and-tendon carpentry to English milled paneling, tate creates houses that seem to have been lived in and loved for generations. Among the houses featured in this book is a compoubd in Nashville, Tennesse, including a Georgian house with colonial Revival details, a fieldstone barn, and a Federal bedroom wing, which together create an illusion that the house was built over a two-hundred-year period.A creole-style plantation house with a Federal interior in New Orleans explores the range of styles favored in the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In contrast, a Federal style house atop a hill in the Kentucky horse country faithfully expresses the early-nineteenth-century's fascination with Palladian symmetry and elegance. In a Gulf Coast house, Tate also plays homage to Palladio, marrying the plan of a seventeenth-century villa with the airy style of West Indian plantations. With an introduction by Southern architecture expert Susan Sully, excerpts from the work of Tate's favourite writers including Octavio Paz and Jorge Borges, evocative essays and interviews with the architect, this book is an illuminating expression of Tate's Classical Journey. "My destiny has been to imagine Beauty and to witness its manifestation in the form of Architecture." - Ken Tate