House Proud

The goals and objectives of House Proud can be summed up in one statement: If I can stop one person from dismantling their Craftsman porch and replacing it with an ornately turned Victorian style ballustrade from Home Depot, I will feel satisfied with my work.

This is not a knock against Victorian homes or Home Depot. I live in Toronto Ontario where there is a large number of Victorian homes. If your house is Victorian then by all means rebuild your porch with turned ballustrades, and Home Depot has a great selection. My point is that all houses have an original style and by using that style as a guide to your renovations and decoration you will ensure that your house is in harmony with itself. A favourite quote of mine is taken from a website called SplitLevel.net

Right now the trend is very dressy doors with oval glass. If you have a bowfront window, avoid these at all costs. A 2005 door with oval glass on a 1967 house with a multiple-square or multi-pane front window just doesn't jive. It's a bit like an old lady wearing a mini-skirt; she looks like an old tart. Put her in a 1960s era pillbox hat, a pink skirt and jacket, with modest black pumps, and the old lady looks positively elegant. Same with the house.

It doesn't matter if your house is a Victorian row house, a 1920's Arts and Crafts bungalow, or a post WWII Ranch Rambler; each house is built with a particular style. Applying decorations or renovations that are in line with that style is the difference between a balanced good-looking home, and a house that is awkwardly attempting to be something it is not.

Updating is Okay

I'm not saying you have to restore your house back to every detail of 100 years ago. You can use modern components and materials. But as it is with most things in the world, every "new" design stands on the shoulders of previous designs. So if you know a bit about the style of your house, you can choose designs that have traits in common with your home.

We can't do it all

There are far more house styles and mixtures of styles than I can possibly document on this site. My hope is to inform people that have participated in a torrid resale market and are in the process of emptying their lines of credit to update these "new" homes. In order to serve the largest group possible I have focused our content on styles that have housed the Middle Class for the last 150 years (Arts & Crafts, Postwar, Georgian and Victorian). Please let us know if you feel we have missed something important that fits this description.

What you will find here

Among the articles on house styles for the middle class, you will find tools and reference pages to help you learn more about your house style. The House Style questionnaire allows you to fill in details about your house and the questionnaire will guess your house style. There is also a place for established communities to document their house styles called Neighbourhood Tour.

This is not an HGTV what not to wear site

In presenting the material here I will make every attempt to focus on style and design and not taste. Everyone has different tastes and I hope not to offend anyone when I state something that might reflect negatively on their choices. I think everyone has purchased something that looked great on the sales floor because it has all the lines and details that they like. But when they got it home it just did not feel right. Its likely that the piece was incongruous with its surroundings. So if you are lucky enough to know what styles you like then use these pages to seek out the house that is in line with those styles so you can fill it with things that you love.

Submit Articles

House Proud is happy to accept article submissions with bylines. We may not publish all submissions but we will respond to all of those that submit a story.

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House Proud leverages Cascading Style Sheets for its layout. As IE does not completely follow the standard, we recommend the CSS Compliant browser Firefox:

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