The Story of Cape Cod Home Plans

Cape Cod home plans were originally manufactured by English settlers in America, who developed this northeastern United States style featuring an ordinary front with central door flanked by two windows, and gabled roof with small dormers. Next time you see someone playing Monopoly, consider the little green houses put down on Park Place and Boardwalk. These game pieces, with their steep roofs, central chimneys, and rectangular shapes, are good types of classic Cape Cod home architecture. While Cape Cod is a quintessentially American style, the earliest styles were integrated the 1600’s by English settlers in imitation of the simple thatched cottages common in England. It is a great design to help keep out harsh New England winters, since the heart of the property is a big central chimney which gives heat to all rooms clustered Cape Royale, in addition to light and fire for cooking. Exteriors along with roofs were sheathed in cedar shingles, which also helped to insulate contrary to the cold. Coastal home plans from the 17th and 18th centuries often had uninsulated crawl spaces beneath the initial floor of used as root cellars and the first settlers packed seaweed from the stone foundations to insulate against the chilling drafts blowing from the ocean. Steep roofs quickly shed snow and rain. Simply speaking, Cape Cod design is about functionality as opposed to form.

The style had largely died out until Royal Barry Willis, a Boston architect, revived the style in the 1920’s as a modern choice for housing. Willis retained the exterior shape of the Cape Cod, but he adapted the inside to modern lifestyles. The majority of homes seen today were built after World War II, when returning soldiers with young families needed inexpensive, functional housing. The Cape Cod filled this bill magnificently, and it was the fundamental design of a number of America’s first big housing developments, such as for example William J. Levitt’s Levittown on Long Island, NY, which contained over 17,000 identical homes; and that was a product for all later developments.

The main element elements which characterize Cape Cod cottage style house plans are: a large central chimney located directly behind the front door; rooms which cluster for this chimney in a square shape; a steep roof with shallow overhang to quickly shed snow and rain; and two windows on either side of the front door, often with dormers flanking the chimney which start into the attic; weathered gray shingle siding (although newer homes in this style can also be built of stone, brick, or stucco). The second floor, that has been often used for boarders or seafaring men, was accessed by a slender “captain’s stairway” with very steep risers and shallow treads minimizing the utilization of space on the first floor. The benefit of Cape Cod homes is that they are inexpensive to build and maintain: a small house on a tiny lot costs even less than the average new home. Moreover, the cozy floor plan of Cape Cods is good for retirees and other folks without large families who don’t want the price and hassle of maintaining a huge home.