The houses of Montgomery County
Montgomery County holds three different building traditions within its borders, and a house’s location in the county tells you a lot about how it was built.
The lower county and the Main Line. Lower Merion was part of the Welsh Tract, settled by Welsh Quakers in the late 1600s, and a few stone farmhouses from that era survive among later houses. What defines the area today came after the Pennsylvania Railroad opened its Main Line west of Philadelphia in the mid-1800s. Wealthy Philadelphians built country estates and, later, substantial suburban houses in Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Norman, Arts and Crafts, and Shingle styles. Houses from the 1880s through the 1930s make up much of the housing in Gladwyne, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Merion Station, and Wynnewood.
Wissahickon schist. Much of that building used Wissahickon schist, a gray-to-brown stone with a mica sparkle, quarried locally and laid in random rubble or roughly squared courses. It appears across Lower Merion, Cheltenham, and Whitemarsh, often with contrasting sandstone or limestone trim. The same stone gives Chestnut Hill and Germantown, just over the city line, their character. Schist houses are durable, but they depend on sound mortar joints and working gutters.
The central and upper county. North of the Main Line, the character shifts to older villages and farms. Gwynedd was another early Welsh settlement. Skippack grew as an eighteenth-century village along Skippack Creek, and the upper county around the Perkiomen Valley has Pennsylvania German stone farmhouses and bank barns. Ambler is a borough with a distinct history as an asbestos manufacturing town in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which left behind worker housing and materials that matter to anyone renovating there. Elkins Park, in Cheltenham, has a notable collection of Gilded Age estates.
Projects we take on in Montgomery County
In Montgomery County, whole-home remodeling often means updating substantial early twentieth-century houses: replacing aging mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, adding modern cooling, and reworking service wings and kitchens while keeping the plaster, millwork, leaded glass, and slate that give these houses their quality. Kitchens and baths in older homes are often part of that scope, since many original kitchens were servants’ spaces never meant to be the center of the house.
Home additions on the Main Line are shaped by lot size, setbacks, and impervious-coverage limits as much as by design. We plan additions that respect the original massing and match the stone, roofing, and trim closely enough that the house reads as a whole.
On larger parcels, we build custom homes that fit among their older neighbors in scale, stone, and roofline.
For older stone farmhouses in the central and upper county, our historic home restoration work includes lime repointing, window repair, and careful structural work on original framing.
Carriage houses and stone outbuildings on older estates are candidates for barn and outbuilding conversions.
Houses from the 1900s through the 1930s have their own hidden conditions. Knob-and-tube wiring, steam and hot-water heating lines buried in walls and floors, galvanized supply pipe, and early additions framed differently from the main house are all common. Slate roofs, copper gutters, and built-in box gutters may be decades past their last real maintenance. We investigate these systems during preconstruction and give you a clear picture of what needs attention now and what can wait.
Historic districts and approvals
Most historic review in Montgomery County happens at the township level, and it varies considerably from one township to the next.
Township historical commissions. Lower Merion Township maintains a historical commission and an inventory of historic resources, and properties on that inventory can face additional review, especially for demolition or major exterior change. Several other townships in the county have historical commissions or historic resource provisions in their zoning ordinances.
Local historic districts. Pennsylvania’s Historic District Act (Act 167 of 1961) allows municipalities to create districts with a Historical Architectural Review Board. Some Montgomery County municipalities use this tool for specific neighborhoods or village centers. Whether your house falls within one is something to confirm before design begins.
Zoning. On the Main Line in particular, zoning limits on impervious surface, steep slopes, and setbacks often shape an addition more than historic review does.
Requirements vary by municipality and change over time, so homeowners should confirm current rules with their township or borough. We help prepare applications alongside your architect, including existing-conditions documentation and material samples, and we plan approval steps into the preconstruction schedule.