Vernacular Domestic Styles
In Haute-Normandie and in pays d'Auge, Mortainais, Passais and Avranchin (Basse-Normandie), the vernacular domestic architecture is typically half-timbered and thatched.
The half-timbered farmhouses scattered across the countryside are inherited of an older tradition that finds its root in the Celtic farms, whose remains were excavated by the archeologists. A particular style of farm enclosure clos masure or cour-masure has developed in the Pays de Caux as a result of the harsher landscape of that area and a local tradition, that has been influenced by the English and Danish design.
Brick and flintstone are later used to build or to rebuild a part of the cottages and official monuments (town halls, etc.). Villages of the pays de Caux and pays de Bray were entirely rebuilt this way.
The other parts of Basse-Normandie, especially the Cotentin Peninsula, tends to use granite, the predominant local building material. The Channel Islands also share this influence - Chausey was for many years a source of quarried granite, including for the construction of Mont Saint-Michel. The Caen plain and the Bessin use the traditional limestone, called Caen stone.
Read more about this topic: Architecture Of Normandy
Famous quotes containing the words domestic and/or styles:
“Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)