Classicism

Answering the question, why the traditional (classical) style?

‘Classicism’ is at the simplest level just a bag of tricks for trimming windows, doors and walls. This is a bag of tricks that anyone can use to make a building that is ‘good enough’. These tricks are not just aesthetic: skirtings, architraves, covings and even the dreaded ‘crown mouldings’, these all have a practical purpose, they literally cover over the cracks. They allow imperfect construction, later modification and easy replacement, they protect things that are likely to wear and deteriorate.

The kind of classical detail we think of is specific to a kind of construction, if you are building with bamboo and waxed paper, then there will be a different kind of classicism. However the classicism we have got in the west is thoroughly adapted to masonry, timber, brick, stone and plaster construction.

The analogy is that you only need to learn a couple of scales, a few chords and a handful of tunes to put on a successful cèilidh, to be ‘good enough’. But you can learn some more more notes and eventually start adapting and writing your own tunes.

Similarly classicism has further tricks, ways of trimming columns and arches, breaking-up large boring surfaces, and composing larger works, but you don’t need these to work competently at a small scale.

One of the ‘classic’ tricks is to use the same or similar trim for everything in your building, the curve on a skirting is similar to the curve on the window frame - this is handy because you can use the same tool for both, but it also magically makes everything look like part of the same whole, a complete composition. These bits of trim ‘rhyme’, this is why people use the analogy of architecture as frozen music.

But isn’t this ‘classicism’ white, European and imperialist? Sure it is, but at it’s simplest level it was the basic toolset of everybody in the west from Irish tenant farmers to black sharecroppers for hundreds of years. By all means don’t use the top end of the scale, your house doesn’t need to look like the British Museum, you don’t have to ’throw the baby out with the bathwater’, but those Greek temples do look kind-of cool after all, and it isn’t the worst thing you could do. Do please develop a new classic style that reflects the things you value, Europe in the middle-ages did this wonderfully, and this will surely happen again.

But remember that any classic style starts with tricks for covering the cracks, tricks for dealing with imperfection - if you try and build a style based on industrial machinery, plastic, stainless steel, sharp-edges and precision tooling, you will fail so badly that it hurts, your work will look tired and dented, will never be fixed or adapted and will be torn down and disposed within your lifetime.

So this is why Homemaker produces buildings in a classic or ’traditional’ style, because it is a well travelled bag of tricks that can be easily used to make a building that is ‘good enough’, good enough is all we need in a world where nothing else is.

Trying this yourself

Some practical starting points, if you want to apply any of this rather than just read about it:

• Look at surviving pre-1900 buildings in your own region before anywhere else. The local dialect of classicism — proportions, materials, the specific profile of a moulding — is already sitting there, weathered and proven, and it’s a better starting point than importing a style from somewhere else entirely.
• Start with the visible trim: skirtings, architraves, window and door surrounds. This is the low-risk, high-return end of the bag of tricks, and it’s where the ‘rhyming’ effect described above (reusing one curve everywhere) pays off fastest.
• If you want to see this form language actually generating a building rather than just describing one, Homemaker’s own output is styled this way by default — the walkthrough’s section on customising style explains how the style system works, including an existing Arab/Mediterranean-influenced ‘courtyard’ style alongside the default.
• This isn’t nostalgia for its own sake — see Living and false traditions for what actually separates copying-as-adaptation from copying-as-fraud, which is the distinction this whole page depends on.

Last updated 12 September 2026.