As someone who routinely builds houses costing nearly $1 million, Peter Perkins is used to particular clients. But how many ask for a fully equipped modern reproduction of a mid-1700s New England Colonial? Not many.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette This large fireplace with beehive oven was built into an early American-style home constructed in Indiana Township. Click photo for larger image.

And how many show up on the construction site every day, armed with a half-dozen binders overflowing with magazine clippings and photocopied pictures?

Only one.

"She just wanted the right details," says Perkins, an Indiana Township-based custom builder. "In that sense, she was very particular."

"She" is a 42-year-old Shaler native, married for 14 years and the mother of three. She asked that her name be left out of this story, not because she's private -- she's actually very outgoing -- but because there just might be a reader out there as fascinated as she is with a brand-new house that feels like a Founding Father's homestead.

If she didn't already own it, she admits, she'd be the first one knocking on the door, asking for a peek inside.

"It's exactly what I had dreamed of. Actually, it's even better," she says.

The 6,000-square-foot clapboard house's unique look starts with its exterior, painted an authentic pumpkin-orange color copied from Cogswell's Grant, an Essex, Mass., landmark. The pilasters, triangular pediment and other trim around the double front door were copied from an early 18th-century house in Deerfield, Mass. And the sandstone blocks that form the front steps came from a Pennsylvania Dutch home of about the same period, with an iron boot scraper thoughtfully included.

The idea for this Colonial sprung from a photo in a magazine. Builder Peter Perkins was hired to replicate the house here. Click photo for larger image.

But it's the interior where the woman's (and Perkins') attention to detail truly shines. Each first-floor room features either raised-panel wainscoting or earlier, beaded and feather-edged paneling. Hand-hewn pine beams span the length of every ceiling and wide pine boards, all attached with rosehead cut nails, run from room to room. Adding atmosphere are two walk-in wood-burning fireplaces (there are six in the house), one with a working beehive oven for baking bread or pizza.

The fireplaces, the focal points of the keeping room and the kitchen/dining room, boast massive hewn oak lintels and Virginia handmade brick. The first floor also contains a pantry with barnwood shelves like those in the 1678 Coffin House in Newbury, Mass., and a tavern room with walnut cage bar (to keep patrons from helping themselves).

Is it starting to sound more like a museum than a house? Then consider that it also has radiant heating, high-velocity air-conditioning, whole-house stereo and Internet access in each room. Modern technology is the answer to the question of why the couple didn't just buy a genuine old house.

"I wasn't up for that," says the man of the house, an information technology consultant for Microsoft. "I like the style, but I also like the modern amenities."

For years his wife had been collecting photos, drawings and notes on house details that she liked. But her dream house really began to take shape when she received the December 1998 issue of Early American Homes magazine. She was entranced by photos of a Lithopolis, Ohio, house that was a near-exact reproduction of the 250-year-old Choate House in Hog Island, Mass.

"When I saw those pictures, I said this is what I've been trying to draw," she says. "It wasn't the layout. It was more the feel of that house, the great features, the detailing."

She immediately called the New England architect, Russell Swinton Oatman,which sent her a small copy of the house's floor plan. In 2000, when the couple found this seven-acre tract in Indiana Township, the woman showed the magazine photos to Perkins, who owned the land and had built several homes nearby.

"Can you build this kind of house?" she asked him. He smiled and took them to see his own home, a stone Georgian he built 16 years ago, based in part on photos of old Western Pennsylvania houses.

Perkins and the couple worked together on plans for a main house measuring 40 by 32 feet with a 36-by-22-foot attached ell. It had five bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths, a three-car garage and a large storage barn. The couple declined to detail the cost.

	Attention to historical detail is evident throughout the 6,000-square-foot clapboard house. The pilasters, triangular pediment and other trim around the double front door were copied from an early 18th-century house in Massachusetts. Click photo for larger image.

After giving Perkins the green light to begin building in August 2001, the woman made a three-day trip to Massachusetts to research the all-important details. At the Sheldon-Hawks House in Deerfield, her enthusiasm with a measuring tape and drawing pad nearly got her in trouble.

"I thought I was going to get arrested," she says, laughing.

While in New England, she also found two Connecticut companies -- Architectural Components and Woodbury Blacksmith -- to fashion the wooden front-door surround and iron H- and L-shaped hinges.

Later, a photo in Country Living magazine led her to cabinetmaker David T. Smith of Morrow, Ohio, who created furniture-like painted and stained cabinets for the period kitchen. The appliances are skillfully disguised -- the refrigerator in a huge brick-red armoire and the dishwasher behind what appears to be paneled, curly maple doors and drawer fronts.

All the colors used in the house are authentic, taken from color schemes provided by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. When the owner was having trouble deciding which colors to use, Perkins offered his own personal design consultant -- his mother, Jean, of Fox Chapel. An antiques buff, Jean Perkins also suggested working interior shutters instead of window treatments in the bedrooms.

"You don't have to wash and iron shutters," she noted.

In the kitchen, cabinetmaker David Smith of Morrow, Ohio, created furniture-like painted and stained cabinets for the period kitchen. The appliances are skillfully disguised -- the refrigerator, far left, in a huge brick-red armoire and the dishwasher behind what appears to be paneled, curly maple doors and drawer fronts. Click photo for larger image.

During the 14 months of construction, the job of pleasing the woman's particular eye fell to Perkins and his subcontractors, including mason Matt Radmanich and trim carpenter Sam Slee.

Despite the woman's insistence on historically appropriate details, she doesn't want her house to be a museum. About half of the furnishings are antiques -- many from Foster's Antique Shop in Wexford -- and the other half reproductions by Keck Jackson of Jackson's Cabinet Shop in Hampton and Raven's End Furniture in Carrollton, Ohio.

"I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable," she says. "My brother is afraid to sit on a chair in the dining room. I say, 'Sit on it. If it breaks, we'll fix it.' "

But that doesn't mean she'll stand for modern anachronisms like doorknobs instead of iron thumb latches, even if the kids occasionally complain, "Mom, I can't open the door!" And the finished basement is the only place you'll find carpeting.

"It's not as comfortable as a modern house," her husband notes. "You can't plunk yourself on the floor in front of the TV."

Some reproduction rag rugs will eventually cozy up the family room and bedrooms, says the woman with the particular eye.

"You have to be a little bit patient with a house like this," she says.

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Kevin Kirkland is the Post-Gazette's homes editor. He can be reached at kkirkland@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1978.