The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship
Since penning his first book on design failures in 1985, prolific author and civil engineer Petroski has also written at length about design successes, including such previously unheralded implements as paper clips, pencils, and toothpicks. In his latest work, Petroski picks a much more personal topic on which to focus his manufacturing expertise, his own second home on a riverbank in coastal Maine. When Petroski and his wife, Catherine, bought the cabin-like retreat several years ago, he had little idea it would be filled with enough design quirks to provoke him into a full-scale investigation of its construction history. Along with knotty pine walls and oddly built closets, the house features its own secret passage. Petroski’s research included surveying the building’s unusual environs and interviewing former owners and surviving relatives of its eccentric builder. Though this fascinating history of a house includes painstaking attention to woodcrafting techniques that may excite professional and amateur ­architects and ­carpenters a bit more than general readers, the book is replete with Petroski’s usual fascinating details and elegant prose. --Carl Hays