House-Dreams
Written by  Hugh Howard

Imagine a house tailored to your every need and personal taste. A home with generous living and dining rooms to entertain friends, a kitchen to suit your style, views where you want them, and a study large enough for all your favorite things.

Hugh Howard always dreamed of building such a house. When he and his wife, Betsy, learn that they’re expecting their second child, Howard seizes the opportunity. It doesn’t matter that his only formal training was working two summers as an electrician’s assistant when he was in college or that the tow young men who help him – on a skilled hunter, the other a college student from Scotland – have little or no experience in the building trades. Howard is determined to design and build a house with his own two hands, a house that combines a sense of history with all the comforts of modern amenities. He learns as he goes, taking the reader on engaging detours through history, architecture and home design.

Fifteen months later and wildly over budget, Howard – having put in some four thousand hours – completes a home for his family: a fine twenty-fife-hundred-square foot Federal style house. Each piece has a story, from the antique cut nails that come from an old hardware store to the staircase from nineteenth-century parsonage. And along the way, Howard builds a community of new friends – a third generation mason who constructs a remarkable Russian heater; a eccentric Irish landscaper who creates an unusual garden design; and Charlie, whose ancestors helped establish the hamlet where Howard builds his home.

Full of good stories, bright ideas and passion for architectural history, House-Dreams is a gratifying story about a man with a dream and the inclination to fulfill it-whatever it takes.