At Home in New England

Royal Barry Wills Architects 1925 to Present

By (author) Richard Wills With Keith Orlesky

Hardback - £30.00

Publication date:

06 February 2014

Length of book:

192 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442224254

The now venerable firm of Royal Barry Wills was founded in a one-room office on Boston's Beacon Street in 1925. Initially fueled by word of mouth and occasional newspaper exposure, the firm gained admiration for Wills’s fresh take on various New England styles, including Georgian, Tudor, French Provincial, and Colonial American. Driven by the country's desire for both aesthetic appeal and practicality, the firm's popularity increased dramatically with its focus on the creation of modern homes inspired by the one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod houses, which perfectly balanced the classic and the new.

Now run by his son, Richard Wills, the firm has been designing elegant private homes in the classically inspired Colonial New England tradition for more than eighty-five years. As time has passed, their Cape Cod-style homes have proven remarkably adaptable to the demands of contemporary life, while staying true to Wills's original flair for intermingling past and present. This book features examples of the firm's work from its founding to the present, with an emphasis on more recent houses that have been built throughout New England.
'The Cape Cod cottage,' Wills writes, 'adapts to all the demands that a 21st-century lifestyle can throw at it.' That's why Wills and his associates have stuck to the tradition of building comfortable, attractive, and practical houses for America's families.