Builder's Guides and Pattern Books
Derivative features in the Nichols-Rice-Cherry House
Image 1. Front door of the Nichols-Rice-Cherry House (NRC). Photo by author. Edit on 24 June 2025: I was just informed that this is not the original door of the NTC. I will issue a detailed correction on 28 June 2025.
Architectural pattern books or plan books, published in the 1840s and 1850s, facilitated the construction of quality buildings even before architecture was a profession. Such authors included Alexander Jackson Davis, Andrew Jackson Downing, Edward Shaw, Catharine Beecher, and Charles Dwyer. Eventually, some of these plans proliferated in the secondary publication market, most notably in Godey’s Lady’s Book, a magazine which published hundreds of plans for dwellings in the last half of the nineteenth century.1
Prior to these pattern books were the earlier and less widely distributed builder’s guides, which were limited to illustrations and explanations of architectural features, such as, “classical columns, capitals, and entablatures. . . . doorways and window frames.” Builders, often trained as carpenters, installed these features as ornament for plain houses. Architectural scholar Margaret Culbertson attributes some features of the Nichols-Rice-Cherry House (NRC) in Houston to the influence of builder’s guides. She claims that an original doorway and a frieze on the house compared favorably to those represented in Lafever’s Modern Builder’s Guide. Texas builders trained as carpenters typically adopted easily executed regional vernacular and imported architectural orders and details from publications, making Texas dwellings a hybrid of regional and national style.2
Image 2. Sam, one of the resident cats at Sam Houston Park, joined me for lunch one day.
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 80-8. See also Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 48-54, 75-80; Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 24-42; Margaret Culbertson, Texas Houses Built by the Book: The Use of Published Designs, 1850–1925 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1999).
Culbertson, Texas Houses Built by the Book, 3[quoted]-4; Clark, The American Family Home, 6-9.