Though it doesn't have to, Living Local often means embracing the styles you find right in your own backyard. Frequently inspired by the resources indigenously available to a local region, the lifestyles, trends, and must-haves in a home were long based on geography and economy until the influences of mass media adjusted our eye(s) for fashion. Though trends now differ from home to home and taste to taste more than ever, there are still common home and home-goods designs that remain true to a geographical area, like New England.
Below are ten New England design habits. If you can check some off the list, it may just mean you belong right here in good old New England....
10. You may or may not have a mudroom full of fancier things, but you love your LL Bean tote and rain boots.
9. In the summer, you kickback in your boathouse, pull up a chair on a dock, or hop outside for a family canoe race. 
8. Firewood is not only a heating must-have, it's also a rustic decoration on your porch.
7. Oars, lighthouses, rope, ships in a bottle, pictures of sailing boats? Yeah, you have 'em. 
5. Shingles? For sure.
3. You knew what shiplap was before Joanna and Chip Gaines made it famous.
2. Without that New-England-history-lesson, it could appear to be simply boring. But your exterior trim matches your base color, even if it's not fashionable anywhere else. |
| Until the Industrial Revolution, most paints in New England were mixed in small batches using naturally found earth pigments. Paint colors, therefore, tended to reflect these pigments: red oxide, yellow ocher, lamp black, red and white lead, etc. Common exterior colors were especially reds, yellows, and greens, and most often entire homesteads tended to have one exterior color. |
1. You cannot get enough stone walls!
