Foursquare and Craftsman houses, and what that means underfoot
Old Ottawa South is one of the strongest matches in the city for the kind of work we do, and it comes down to house shape. The architectural character here is mostly Craftsman, with many homes in the American Foursquare style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. A Foursquare is a two storey square-plan house that puts bedrooms directly over living rooms with no structural interruption, and runs a staircase up the middle. That is the squeak archetype. Underneath is strip hardwood over nailed plank subfloor on sawn joists, now roughly a century old and through a hundred seasonal humidity cycles. There are around three hundred residences and institutional buildings here on the City’s heritage reference list, and post-2000 infill has been comparatively limited, so most of what we walk into is original.