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New Homes Melbourne FL

Custom home building seems like such an unreachable goal. Having your own custom house? That’s something only the super rich can afford. But, the truth is, with the right planning, especially financial planning, you can find yourself living in your own vision of a dream home.

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Custom Home Builders

From just a concept, all the way to turning the key, a custom real estate team brings a wealth of experience in commercial, industrial and manufacturing development into your custom home build.

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Craftsman Homes

The Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century focused on minimalism and simplicity of design in furniture and art, and the pinnacle of this style is the design of the American Craftsman home.

Origin The Arts and Crafts movement began in the U.K. in the mid-19th century as part of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Designers rejected the ostentatious ornament of Victorian furniture design, preferring the simple craftsmanship of medieval construction. Arts and Crafts valued simple, hand-made objects, from the workshop of a virtuous craftsman. When the style crossed the Atlantic to the United States forty years later, American designers began applying Arts and Crafts style to furniture, art, and even homes.

Gustav Stickley One of the foremost designers of Arts and Crafts style furniture in the United States was Gustav Stickley. In 1901, Stickley began publishing The Craftsman, a magazine promoting designers in the Arts and Crafts movement. The magazine expanded beyond ornament and furniture and published architectural plans for homes designed in the Arts and Crafts style. Home builders began constructing these homes, and popularity grew for the open, airy and artistic structures.

Craftsman Style The style of the Craftsman home varied as it was adapted to the colder Northern states, the wide-open prairies, and the Pacific southwest. Common features across all styles echoed the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement: simple lines, basic hand-made designs, and minimal ornamentation.

Arts and Crafts homes display large amounts of exposed wood, such as beams and supporting columns. Functional shelves and cabinets are built into the structure and use significant amounts of glass and metal in their construction. Rooms are open and airy and are broken up into "regions" rather than the enclosed rooms of Victorian home design. The Craftsman style was progressive in nature, and grew from a family-oriented perspective that benefited a middle class that could not afford or had no use for live-in servants and caretakers. 

Mail-Order Buildings The Sears Roebuck catalog was the only source for many household good for families establishing themselves in the West, far from big cities. In 1908, Sears offered entire homes by mail-order. All the parts needed to build a one-family home were partly assembled, marked and cataloged, and loaded on to a train for delivery to the homebuyer. The kit came with a set of instructions, allowing anyone with basic tool skills and enough labor to get the job done, to purchase a home from the catalog and have it built, ready to move in, within a few days.

The popularity of Craftsman style homes, combined with the simple Arts and Crafts construction methods, made the architectural style optimal for mail-order delivery. The "bungalow" style was popular in the far west, while the "foursquare" was a common home on the Midwest prairies. Although the structure and layout was different, appropriate for the climate, many of the Sears homes shared various traits of the Craftsman style. Many of them survive until today.

Although many have been adapted over the years and their Arts and Crafts characteristics either lost or covered by decades of paint, a popular movement has undertaken restoring these homes to their original state.