We are one month away from our house being finished and I cannot believe it!! In about 30 days, we’ll be moving into our house. Our home. Maybe it goes without saying (considering everything I’ve already said), but this nearly three-year-long process of designing and building our home has been so personal for us. Our slab of cement turned into 2×4’s, turned into painted drywall with a roof and a rock chimney is not just a house, it is our family’s home! With nods to our ancestral heritage, to our adventures of the past, and to our hopes for what our family life looks like moving forward, our home literally tells our family’s story. Designing our family story through our home has been a chicken-and-the-egg situation with some details coming because of our story, and others just coming along and magically fitting in. The latter is the case with our home’s exterior and architectural style. I’ll elaborate and with, first, a confession…
At the start of our building journey, I fell in love with a home that had a completely new, novel-to-me architectural style. I saw a photo of this darling home while scrolling Pinterest one night as I looked for inspiration for a pretty, two-story home with a forward-facing garage (our two requisites for our custom build because of our lot’s size and shape). Leaping out at me mid-scroll, this amazing shingle-style home knocked me off my feet. A shingle-style home! Just like my favorite homes in California. And look at those rooflines! They’re bell-curved?? They are darling! I had never seen a home like that in my life. Right away, I wanted that charmer to be mine.
But as it often does, ol’ Fear came running from the left field of my mind and shot me down.
You can’t build a house like that!
That house is so unique. Like it’s too unique.
Have you ever really seen a house like that before?
Do houses like that exist in Southern Utah?
Don’t even think about going there!
I listened to Fear, that bully, putting aside that darling house that I loved because, well, it was just so unique.
Fast forward one year to July 2021. Late one night, Ryan and I stared at the completed house plans that we had worked on from November 2020 – March 2021, realizing that, for a handful of reasons, the home starting back at us from the page just wasn’t “the one.” Remembering that darling bell-curved house, we decided to make a move then that some would see as bold and others would deem dumb: we scrapped our first house and started drawing a better, more efficient floor plan for our family, all around the exterior style of the house that I first loved. Time had given us space to realize that we just could not throw away our shot. If we had this one chance to build a home together for our precious little family, we had to take the risk of shooting the shot – not worrying about outside opinions – and make our home completely ours.
With that as our springboard, we took off. For the first time, we looked up what that “bell-curved” roof line was actually called. A gambrel, we learned, was a defining characteristic of the classic Dutch Colonial architectural style – a style commonly found on America’s North East coast where early Dutch settlers landed. The gambrel roofline was invented by the Dutch as a way to maximize their resources, as the pitched roof line allowed them to add a second-story loft where the rooflines met. And yet, because the second story was just tucked into that gambrel roofline, the extra space literally counted as a loft and taxes on a two-story home were entirely evaded. With more space for less money, those frugal Dutchmen had happily invented a very win-win situation.
“Awerkamp” is Dutch. Whenever I get a wide-eyed, surprised response at the sound and sight of our big last name, I just say “Yes, Awerkamp! It’s Dutch,” and its uniqueness make sense. The land of the tall people, the Netherlands fuels Ryan’s bloodline (with a vein flowing from Germany), and when we learned about the Dutch Colonial style and its roots, we realized that in building that shingle-style home with its bell-curved roof, we would be building from our roots! The Awerkamp family building a Dutch Colonial home just felt right.
The rest is proving to be history! Our bell-curved home is coming right along…
Totally embracing uniqueness, we love our Dutch Colonial home! We love that it pays a small homage to our greater family in the past, and that it gives our little family identity in the present.
Awerkamp! It’s Dutch. 🙂
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Enjoy a few shots of some awesome Dutch Colonial homes from Nantucket to Dallas, from Salt Lake City to Cape Cod, and from Connecticut to New Hampshire. Just like anything good in life, once you get to know this great architectural style, you’ll never forget it!
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