Architectural Home Styles

Every custom home begins with a question of character. Some families are drawn to the steep gables and deep porches of a Modern Farmhouse; others to the formal symmetry of a Georgian, the horizontal calm of a Prairie Modern, or the storybook presence of a Tudor. The architectural style is the home’s identity the thing a family pictures long before the first drawing.

Forest Heart Builders designs and builds across the full range of styles being commissioned in the Chicago suburbs today. The pages in this library introduce ten of them: what defines each style, the materials and palette that bring it to life, where it sits most comfortably across our service area, and how our in-house millwork studio serves the specific craft each idiom demands. Whichever direction a family is drawn toward, the constant is the same a generational home, built to a single standard of craftsmanship.

A note on style and approach: the architectural style describes how a home looks. It is a separate question from how a home is engineered whether it is built as a high-performance green home, with full smart-home integration, or to our standard custom specification. Any of the ten styles below can be built to any of those approaches. Explore the styles here; explore the approaches on the Custom Homes pages.