Acclaimed architect Gil Schafer illustrates how he blends classical architecture, interior decoration, and landscape to create homes with a feeling of history. As a traditional architect, Gil Schafer specializes in building new "old" houses as well as renovating historic homes. His work takes the best of American historic and classical architecture-its detailed moldings and harmonious proportions-and updates it, retaining its character and detail while simultaneously reworking it to be more in tune with the way we live now-comfortable, practical, family-oriented. In his first book, Schafer covers the three essential cornerstones of creating a great traditional house: architecture, landscape, and decoration. He discusses the important interplay between the interior architecture and the fabrics, furniture, and wall treatments. In-depth profiles build on these essays, including Schafer's own new "old" house in the Hudson Valley; the renovation of a historic home in Nashville designed by Charles Platt in 1915; and the restoration of a magnificent 1843 Greek Revival mansion in Charleston. Filled with hundreds of interior and detail shots, The Great American House is an invaluable resource for anyone who loves old houses and traditional design.

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.