Heritage Creek Architecture

Milton, Delaware, once a quaint Victorian shipbuilding village, is known for its small town charm, community of small businesses, and restored Historic homes. The citizens of Milton are committed to preserving the charm of this beautiful town and Schell Brothers shares in that commitment. The homes of Heritage Creek were designed as modern, low maintenance adaptations of the type of homes found throughout the town, a style we've coined Miltonian architecture, an extraordinary mixture of Victorian and Craftsman style homes.

Victorian

The early decades of the Victorian Era saw the full flowering of the industrial revolution. For the first time, mass production of hardware and supplies made products readily available and affordable to increasingly more people. The prominence of handmade craftsmanship quickly gave way to machine manufacturing. House styles were breaking free from their box-like shapes, with asymmetrical floor planning and elaborate exterior features.

The Victorian Era marked the explosion of creative options and the emergence of intricate, daring forms and techniques available to the homeowner as never before. Designers and architects broke away from the traditional symmetrical lines and simple colors. Victorian homes are colorful, elaborate, and bold. Given the affordable and widespread construction techniques of the era, working class families could, for the first time, build homes of their own.

The tradition of the English cottage and American homestead merged with the romanticism of the era, giving rise to the style known as Folk Victorian. Often found in rural or country settings, Folk Victorian homes are usually constructed from local materials and blend functionality with newer stylistic ornamentation that includes colorful and fluid gingerbread around wide wrap-around porches. Though often less elaborate than their urban counterparts, Folk Victorian homes feature a similar attention to texture variations and creative decoration.

Craftsman

The Arts and Crafts Movement, with its call to return to the ideals of craftsmanship and the honest use of materials that characterized past eras, evolved as a reaction to the increasing industrialization of the Victorian era. Spanning the Victorian Age and extending into the World War II years, the architectural and decorative impulses of the Art and Crafts Movement were expressed in various forms around the world.

The founder, and one of the main voices shaping this movement, was the Victorian Englishman, William Morris. A poet, writer, designer and socialist, Morris spent time studying at Oxford University, intending to become a clergyman. He soon discovered he was far more interested in the decorative arts.

The American Arts and Crafts Movement is characterized by the Craftsman style in architecture. Craftsman houses were generally one and a half to two stories tall. They were environmentally sensitive structures that not only suited, but made good use of their surroundings - the materials that went into Craftsman houses were usually native.

In both architecture and art, the American Arts and Crafts movement shows nostalgia for the personal and private in design and use. Decoration and color are muted and made useful rather than eliminated. Quality and craftsmanship is emphasized, and each element is given weight as part of integrating the design into the complete environment.