Foursquare-style designs were built to last

Blanca Pelayo had driven by the large house with tan wood siding and black window trim hundreds of times.

"I used to say, 'I'd like to buy a house like that,' says Pelayo, a 31-year-old preschool teacher's aide. "I've always liked the older houses. The way they're built, they're not like the new houses, where they look the same."

When the house in Fresno, Calif., went up for sale two years ago, she and husband, Pablo Lopez, snatched it up.

The 3,200-square-foot house is an American foursquare-style home. Built in 1904, it has two upstairs bedrooms, each with its own sunroom. The home also includes a formal dining room, kitchen, office, two more bedrooms and an attic.

The home, which is listed in Fresno's Local Register of Historic Resources, was designed by local architect A.C. Schwartz and is known as the A.G. Wishon home. Wishon's company, the San Joaquin Light and Power Co., was a predecessor of PG&E, says Karana Hattersley-Drayton, Fresno's Historic Preservation Project manager.

"The type was popular in the Midwest by the mid-19th century and was brought to this area by Fresno's early settlers," Hattersley-Drayton says. "The foursquare house is the basic plan for several architectural styles: neoclassical, colonial revival and the prairie."

Foursquare homes are usually one- or two-story symmetrical "boxes" with hipped roofs and four roughly equal rooms downstairs and upstairs, she says. Many Fresno homes that fit this style were built between 1900 and 1920, are two-story, and have full-width, one-story porches with classical columns, she says.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)