A Field Guide to America’s Historic Neighborhoods and Museum Houses: The Western States

A tour of domestic
architecture in the cities and towns
of the American West

In this new, information-packed field guide, the authors of the perennially popular A Field Guide to American Houses–the book that taught us how to identify architectural styles–now show us houses well worth looking at and the neighborhoods in which we can find many of them, in 110 cities and towns in seventeen western Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
The 172 historic neighborhoods covered contain hundreds of interesting dwellings that can be viewed, without ceremony, from the street–and almost 200 museum houses of particular architectural and/or artistic significance whose interiors can be visited.
The book is organized alphabetically by state, and by cities and towns within each state. An introduction to each city or town (together with descriptions of its neighborhoods and museum houses) explains how the area developed and how its architectural styles document its past.
There are 701 illustrations–historic and current–to instruct and entice house-lovers. The 173 maps show the location of every neighborhood and every museum house included–and point the way to the most interesting districts.
The book’s introduction provides a chronological over-view of the entire West–with illustrations and maps that show the region’s principal styles of pre-1940 domestic architecture. The appendix points out the geographic and design factors that have contributed to the overall character of various western neighborhoods.
Like the McAlesters’ A Field Guide to American Houses, this new book is a labor of love and a work of immense knowledge that will stand as a classic in its an invaluable book for people fascinated with houses, for architectural buffs, and for actual–and armchair–travelers in the American West