In the summer of 2002, I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area in California--where I was born and had lived all my life--to the Tampa Bay Area in Florida.

For the previous twelve years in California, I lived with my husband, Larry, in a tiny 750 square foot cabin next to a creek, on an acre of bay and fir forest. The cabin was one of the first that was built in 1930, when a new railroad was put in from San Francisco to points north and vacation cabins sprang up around the train station. It was also the first house on the street to have a telephone, and the owners would leave the doors unlocked 24 hours a day so the neighbors could come in anytime and use it.

The house was typical of the Northern California rustic resort cabins built at that time. As we remodeled, we could see that it began as a single room, with knotty pine paneling--real boards of knotty pine instead of the more expensive plaster. Rooms were added one by one as the Great Depression turned the vacation cabin into a year-round residence. And so, year after year, the little one-room cabins in the area grew into unique houses, based on the needs of their owners and the materials at hand. You could go from house to house in the neighborhood and see the one pine-paneled room from which each house originated.

When we remodeled, we stayed with that style. We took out the rusted metal cabinets in the kitchen, purchased years earlier from the Sears catalog, and put in custom-built knotty pine open shelves and cabinets. We removed aluminum sliding doors and installed old wooden French doors from the salvage yard. There was a style that we could clearly identify and follow--it was the style, not so much of the house, but a style common to the place.

When we moved to Florida after selling the house in California, it only made sense to buy another house right away, even though we didn't know this new place. We purchased a house with a style that seemed familiar to us: kind of nondescript suburban ranch. It's a nice suburban ranch house, much bigger than our California cabin at 1,580 square feet, with high ceilings, original hardwood floors, and a grove of native oaks with understory citrus trees in the back yard. But it is a suburban ranch house nonetheless, one which could have been built in Connecticut as well as California or Florida.

Now that I've learned the nature of this place called Florida, I see there is an architectural style that has evolved from the characteristics of the place, its people, its climate, and its materials.

This style, which is unique to a place and based in regional influences, is known as "vernacular architecture." The word vernacular comes from the Latin vernaculus, which means native. Vernacular means using that which is native and common to a region or country rather something that is foreign.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we know vernacular architecture: that colonial houses come from the northeast, Victorians are common in San Francisco (the result of most of the city being rebuilt at the height of this style, after the 1906 earthquake), brownstone row houses are in New York, and adobes are in New Mexico.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, all architecture was vernacular, just as all farming was organic. Regionally appropriate building techniques and designs were taught from father to son and neighbor to neighbor as each man built his own house for his family.

But when industrialization introduced mass production and increasing wealth allowed styles and materials to be imported from other places, traditional styles--and their place-appropriate design features--began to be lost. Today, building wisdom rooted in place has practically vanished as developers bulldoze all recognizable features from the land and build acres of identical boxes with standardized floorplans using standardized materials, with climates controlled using nonrenewable resources. Sure, these new houses may have various style characteristics placed on the outside, but essentially, most new construction is the same in every city, town, and village across America.

Being in the business of fixing up fixer-uppers, my husband and I like to watch the television show "Curb Appeal" on HGTV. It's interesting how people want to have the exterior of their home be this style or that--only occasionally is the project to return the house to it's original vernacular style. Last night we watched an episode where the landscape designer chose palm trees for a San Francisco house (a tree not native to that place) for the very reason that there were no other palm trees on the block! Clearly the idea of place-appropriateness was not being considered there.

A fundamental aspect of what makes a home green is to tie it to the nature of the place in which it is built. This principle applies to all aspects of the home, from incorporating design features appropriate to local conditions and siting to preserve the integrity of the ecosystem, to using traditional heating and cooling devices, local materials, and colors and artifacts of the region.

Here in Florida, for example, we have hurricanes. After experiencing four hurricanes over six weeks a few months ago, I learned something about what is appropriate housing here. On the one hand, I learned that in Key West, there are houses that have survived a century of hurricanes. They are built slightly off the ground with an open foundation so the wind will blow under the house instead of slamming into it, allowing the house to stay standing. On the other hand, I learned that mobile homes, of which there are a huge number here, as affordable housing for retired seniors, barely stand up to even Category 1 hurricane force winds. While I was doing volunteer hurricane relief work, I saw first hand the miles and miles of mobile homes flattened by a hurricane, and those who had resided in them left homeless, and thought mobile homes should be banned in Florida.

Vernacular architecture begins with siting. Rather than bulldozing the land and stripping it of all vegetation, people in times past carefully sited houses to preserve the land and its resources, using the unique characteristics of the land to create a building that would sustain their life and livelihood.

Climate considerations are next. The need to keep warm resulted in large living rooms where all activities could take place in the one room that had a fireplace, sod roofs for insulation, and the Cape Cod roof made larger on one side to protect the house from fierce northern storm winds. The need to keep cool gave rise to houses wrapped with verandas to shield windows and rooms from direct sun, floor-to-ceiling windows to bring in breezes, and vented belvederes (also called cupolas) constructed on rooftops to allow hot air to escape.

Building styles came from vernacular materials. Wooden houses in forested regions looked very different from desert houses made of adobe bricks. Before railroads made it easy to transport materials, builders were forced to use the materials at hand, and found ways to make them both useful and beautiful. Using local materials firmly establishes a building in a place. It becomes an extension of its surroundings, rather than a foreign object.

Regions have their own colors, too. New England barns and houses were painted red to absorb solar heat, using a mixture of rust, milk, and lime. Whitewash was used in the South for the opposite reason--to reflect light and keep houses cool.

So now I want my house to be a Florida house, just as my California house was a California house. There's a style here called "Cracker," referring to 19th century Florida pioneers who ate cracked corn and cracked whips to drive oxen. Their designs kept their homes cool without electrical air conditioning. So I need to add a nice deep veranda (my house, amazingly, has no porch at all!) and a cupola to draw hot air up and out of the house, and my "international" house will be transformed into a building as Floridian as pink flamingos.

For most of the history of housing, all homes were vernacular, but then again, everything everyone did from morning until night was rooted in the natural characteristics of the places in which they lived. Industrialization allowed us to break free of that restriction. Humans are different from rocks and plants and animals in that we have the ability to create practically any environment that we can imagine. Having that freedom allows us to create wondrous things but sometimes at the cost of breaking the tie to place. Vernacular architecture gives us a context within which we can create the home of our dreams, and become part of the flow of life instead of working against it.

Take a look around and learn the vernacular style of your area, then see how you can incorporate it in your own home with architectural features, materials, colors, and styles.

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