Home at Last: Enduring Design for the New American House

Bestselling author and popular American architect Gil Schafer returns with the final installment in his trilogy on the rewards of living in the American house.

The work of Gil Schafer—one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary traditional architecture—is beloved for its elegance, charm, and strong sense of history and place. Since his last book, Schafer has become a husband and stepfather, a change that has deepened his understanding of how a house must reflect and support the lives of those who live within its walls. Home at Last is a distillation of what he has learned and how he translates it to his work on houses that are adaptive to the evolution of life, depending upon a family’s needs.

The book includes homes he has designed in the mist-covered Hudson Valley, on a bluff above Lake Champlain, on the windswept shores of Block Island, and on the coast of Maine. Schafer shares the stories of these houses and their owners, exploring the choices made for architecture and interiors, and reemphasizing his guiding principles: how to create classical buildings that “live modern”; how to adapt buildings to different regions and ways of life; the connection to landscape; why fancy can coexist with simple, and traditional with modern.  

With original photography by Eric Piasecki, layered with practical takeaways, Home at Last is a tribute to the power of the American house.