Old Look, Modern Living

"If you look at our street, they were all post-war ramblers that are getting knocked down, and there is another new farmhouse-style here, so we were not the trendsetters," Hendricks said.

The attraction of building history from scratch is strong, said Clark Simpson, owner of Mickey Simpson Ltd., an architectural and building firm in Arlington. "I sell them at full price before I finish them," he said. "They fit into the neighborhood because of the styling and the detailing."

Simpson's big seller is a model he calls the Highland because the first one he built was on Highland Avenue in Arlington. The inspiration for the design was a Sears, Roebuck catalogue from 1926.

"We have a reprint of the catalogue and we can find houses in that catalogue right in this neighborhood," Simpson said. Rather than trying to pull off a half-hearted attempt at fakery, he said, the company pays attention to the fine points. "We have looked at so may houses built in the '20s and the catalogues, especially proportions, trim details like beaded porch ceilings, two-over-two window grids, and we put an intense amount of detail into the exteriors."

The model has been so successful that Simpson now offers it in three different sizes from 2,700 to 5,400 square feet. Ross and Lauren Ashley recently bought one of the bigger models. They picked the neighborhood where they wanted to live and waited for a lot to open up. Simpson owned a lot, but there was already a house on it. The Ashleys bought it, knocked down the house and hired Simpson to build them a Highland.

"We like the exterior because from the front it doesn't look like a huge 5,200-square-foot house," Ross Ashley said. "We get a lot of people who come in and say, 'So what did you remodel?' " The Ashleys' old-looking new house, which is about 5,400 square feet, including the "sleeping porch," was aesthetically pleasing enough and had enough passing grades in the coziness factor, to warrant a spread in Cottage Living.

The five-bedroom, four-bath house was built in about eight months for $1.6 million, including the land. To break out of the small spaces typically found in houses of the 1920s, Simpson configured the floor plan so it would make sense for the present day. "The rooms are proportional to modern homes, so it's not a problem in the 5,400-square-foot model -- even in the smaller ones it's not a problem," he said.

But the idea of using new materials and methods to purposely build something that looks old can still be a head scratcher.

"The client said she wanted a house that looked very traditional and like it had always been there. She brought images to me from the Colonial era and Craftsman," said architect Marta Hansen-Allbright of Allbright Hansen Architects of Annapolis. "I was finally working on a new house, but the images she brought were from restoration homes. I thought it was ironic."

Hansen's own style leans toward the modern, but her clients, Cindy and Bob Riera, preferred an old-school approach for what was to go on the water-view lot in Edgewater.

"I like older things," Cindy Riera said. "I lived in an old farmhouse in Annandale where you had to go into the root cellar to change the heat." Cindy teaches fifth grade; her husband is a defense contractor. They spent years moving from house to house as second-generation Navy families. When they decided to build their own place, they worried over the design until they got it the way they wanted it.

"It took about a year to build and we spent another year going back and forth with Marta, but it's such a gift, whatever time it took was free," Cindy Riera said. During construction, the Rieras lived in Cindy's father's basement and waited for the right stone mason to become available.