Country French is a popular home design style nowadays, both exterior and interior.

In this article, Before The Architect addresses the Country French exterior style.

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Do you think that Country French, or the effected French Country, is a home design style? We’d say, “Not exactly."

        From Before The Architect’s perspective, Country French is a range of house style definitions –

        Comment: There is a stylistic kinship of sorts with other home designer house styles that are casually (and incorrectly) taken as singular and not as a set. For example, American Victorian is a/k/a (Victorian, in each instance) 2nd Empire, Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, Folk, Stick, Shingle, and Richardsonian (Romanesque). Or for example, Southern Colonial ranges from Warburton Home (1680) in James City County, VA or Christ’s Cross (a/k/a Cris Cross) (circa 1690) in New Kent County, VA and simpler, all the way up to Bacon’s Castle (1650) in Surry County, VA and Stratford Hall (1725) in Stratford, VA [noting that other examples abound either standing, or artistically captured earlier-on or reproduced, the author having chosen these for their geographical and temporal proximity, Post-Medieval English roots, and breadth of character].

        Furthermore, while Country French has its home designer roots in the South of France, as a class of home design it’s as American as French fries.

        You’ll find beaucoups publications about Country French on Amazon.com and at your local bookstore. To wit, along with a slew of other home design-oriented books, a while back we ordered Provencal Inspiration: Living The French Country Spirit by Home Planners, and immediately received a notice that Amazon’s out of stock. Country French is back bigtime. As another, more recent example, Before The Architect just completed custom home plans in Country French Style for a property in Asheville, NC to be offered later this year at $4+ million [and the facades really do have a rural sense to them].

        Country French style reminds us more than most of Craftsman style – multiple roof slopes; windows of different sizes and heights; broad overhangs and soffits; knee braces and other exposures of home building structure; front-facing gables; a mix of gable, clipped gable, shed, and hip roofs; natural materials; masonry exterior, especially stone; a mix of finish clads; restraint in exterior accessories and adornments. Country French style can be comfortable and inviting in its more relaxed presentations.

        However, Country French home design departs from the Arts & Crafts Movement in several respects: high-peaked, steeply sloped roofs at pitches way above Craftsman’s; a refinement in exterior trim particularly in rakes; an understatement of observable structure; gutter systems sometimes with gussied-up copper appointments; curved rooflines to accommodate steep slopes, larger windows, unpierced ceilings and interior walls; broad soffits; arches and curve-topped dormers, elaborated ironwork; balconies; turrets; Classic columns; masonry accessories in relief, some interest in symmetry, etc. Simplicity and elegance.

        There are ways to botch Country French home designing, e.g., hold rooflines to one pitch to assure consistent soffit depth and single-level eaves – in the name of cheap, easy, and stylistically insensitive; apply Corinthian columns in lieu of, say, Tuscan, or flute the Tuscan columns; confuse French styling with English, unbalance vertical and horizontal to favor horizontal; not mullion grouped windows, not apply true French casement windows; use plastic shutters, S-dog the shutters, not apply true French doors, asphalt shingle the roof, insist on broad facia and frieze boards, etc.

        And there are ways to develop Country French by using - contemporary technologies, among them, e.g., cost-efficient cultured stone, particularly in its fieldstone representations – perhaps by Owens Corning; and by using artistry, e.g., the half-round copper gutter systems of A. B. Raingutters, Inc., Classic Gutter Systems, L.L.C., the gas or electric luminaires of Charleston Lighting Company or the aluminum wrought-like railing of Southeaster home designing Metals, the garage doors of the Carriage Home Door Company, and the like.

        In our home plan work at Before The Architect with our backgrounds in both your home design and home building, we find Country French style encourages applying home design principles of excellent home design, such as, Russell Versaci’s Creating a NEW OLD HOME: Yesterday’s Character For Today’s Home, The Taunton Press, 2003, and Jacobson, Silverstein, and Winslow’s Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design, The Taunton Press, orig. 1941, reprint 2002; and, separately, sacred geometry. Here again, you can embrace and succeed or disregard and fail in the home designing effort.

        Take, for example, the layering and other arrangement of finish clad, notably in steeply sloped gable ends. In Versaci's realm of signaled, or suggested, age, it is the wise home designer who specifies supposedly older, heavier (looking) materials – fieldstone and the like – from grade up to, say, L1, and then some lighter material higher up. Such arrangement and layering would be particularly in-keeping with more steeply sloped roof gable ends which would most unlikely be originally run up 2 stories under high, hard to support roof pitches. That is, L2 should and would appear to be of more recent vintage than L1, and presenting a story of age without such attention to detail is to send the gift horse packing.

        Finally, in the vernacular of Patterns of Home, again for example, the Country French style readily lends itself to creating a courtyard, or "Creating Rooms, Outside", and to dormered space demonstrating home design keystones of "Refuge and Outlook" under a "Sheltering Roof," particularly if the rooflines are low-profiled and trimmed more simply on L2 than on L1.

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