A LEADER of the “new old house” movement has a new book out about old houses. In Roots of Home: Our Journey to a New Old House, architect Russell Versaci traces the ancestry of home in America. The book takes its readers on a tour of some of the nation’s loveliest private houses. Their beauty turns the tour into a holiday for the eye.

I read Roots of Home after Creating a New Old House: Yesterday’s Character for Today’s Home, the book that in 2003 put Versaci on the map and put a name on the snug paradise that he proposes. Published by the Taunton Press, the two work as a matched set. Most of the photographs in both books are the gorgeous work of Erik Kvalsvik.

Roots of Home is a prequel to New Old House. The latter describes the principles to follow in building new houses that pay homage to the regional American vernaculars described by the former. “We have unearthed forgotten details of style, building techniques, and materials with timeless character and integrated them with the benefits of modern conveniences,” writes Versaci in New Old House. “The houses we have created are new variations on classic styles, blending the emotional comforts of the past with the creature comforts of today.”

Versaci, who grew up in Rhode Island and lives in Middleburg, Va., lists the eight principles, or “Pillars,” that he has learned from building traditional residences. They are: Invent Within the Rules, Respect the Character of Place, Tell a Story Over Time, Build for the Ages, Detail for Authenticity, Craft with Natural Materials, Create the Patina of Age, and Incorporate Modern Conveniences.

Good architects have always invented within the rules, respected the character of place, and built for the ages with natural materials. Half a century ago, however, modern architecture interrupted the organic evolution of architecture. Until a respect for traditional styles returns to the profession, Versaci’s pillars offer shortcuts that make up for the knack that practitioners have lost or the aging of housing stock that modernism has aborted.

Meanwhile, many new home buyers have low expectations for new houses in traditional styles. Today’s builders, sellers and buyers have lost much of the intuitive knowledge required to insist upon high standards from architects. The scarcity of artisans (robbed of work by modernism) has bid up the cost of quality. Shoddy workmanship, inattention to period detail and overweening grandiosity are all too common (“McMansions” commit all three sins). Yet houses of traditional design remain overwhelmingly popular, and buyers take what they can get.

Roots of Home attempts to buttress the validity of building new old houses today by tracing their lineage to colonial America. Versaci cites “Ten Colonial Cradles of Home”: The St. Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys, New England, the Hudson Valley, the Delaware Valley, the Chesapeake Bay, the Carolina Low Country, the Florida Peninsula, the Gulf Coast, the Southwest Borderlands and what Versaci calls Alta (meaning upper) California. English, French, Dutch, Spanish and other national styles mingled to rock these cradles, he says, “nurtur[ing] distinctive house forms rooted in Old World traditions.”

Roots of Home looks back at those forms, charting their evolution via addition and restoration but also through new homes that build creatively on the classic forms. For Versaci, the glory is in the details. “Footprints of the past as blueprints for the future,” he writes. “Pleasing to the eye and satisfying to the soul.” Versaci’s talent for the turn of phrase makes the novelty of his ideas — novelty, that is, within the context of a profession dominated by modernists — seem as old hat as his ideas ought to be.

“Today, the best traditional architects are renewing time-tested traditions in new old houses meant for the present,” says Versaci. “These traditions are constantly evolving. Rather than being dead, historical leftovers, they are living customs, each with a fascinating tale of birth, evolution and renewal over time. Today, we are simply adding new pages to the story.” That is the understatement of the week.

In fact, what Versaci attempts is far more ambitious. The traditions he hopes to revive and is reviving are, as he says, not “dead.” But they have been given up for dead — or worse, they are being murdered — by those who command the heights of his profession. Modern architects and their academic and journalistic camp followers seek to keep traditional architecture from getting back on its feet. Only when it does will America’s built environment again live up to the natural bounty of its purple mountains’ majesty and its amber waves of grain.

Russell Versaci and his fine books convey home truths to home buyers and the architects who serve them. They raise hope for real change — a return to the primacy of a timeless architecture that evolves naturally into the future, and the abandonment of an orthodoxy that stole the word “modern” and perverted what “modernism” ought to mean.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).