Big topic. I'd recommend a month's vacation in Italy. Pick your favorite region. Absorb. Your question reminded me of a garden I used to visit often in Tulsa OK. It used to be the home of a branch of the Phillips family. It's now an art museum. The memory made me go looking for a website, which may provide some inspiration in the garden photo tour section  Here is a link that might be useful: Italianate garden & villa

Historic, thanks for posting these examples. It's always enjoyable to see historic houses, and these are lovely. Each of these is proportioned to be narrow in front and deep to the rear, which is typical of city lots. Have you looked and compared the street front proportions and scale of these houses with your drafted elevations? If you do you will quickly see that these houses have proportions and fenestration that is largest on the lower level, somewhat smaller on the second level and smallest on the attic (third) level. This is very typical of classic houses. Your elevations do not have the same progression and scale--something that your lumberyard drafter probably doesn't have a clue about. Also look carefully at the roof line. There are simple and single gables, and none of the mulitple gable, multiple materials elevations. While Victorians are often highly detailed, and frequently colorful, there is a unity and harmony that characterizes the best of them--as evidenced in your photos. These photos offer good references for your build. If you can get your plans and elevations to this level of refinement you will be very successful and enjoy your new house for many years. Good luck on your project!

First, start hanging out at the Old House forum - what a wealth of knowledge there! Second, think color on top of color - an Eastlake (also often called a Stick Style if there are vertical and horizontal trimboards decorating the exterior walls) could have as many as nine colors on the exterior, but unless you've got the all-out detail I'd probably stop at five! Main body, main trim, roof, major accent, minor accent. Color of the same value (dark/lightness, intensity) as the roof will work best as long as the yellow isn't super pale, but if it's a good medium yellow you've got it made. While earthier tones (although still in sometimes eye-popping combinations!) are more or less most "period", there's no reason at all to avoid using clearer, brighter colors to keep consistency with existing elements like siding and roof, and it does typically appeal more to the modern eye. Believe it or not a light plum/deep lavender would look fantastic with the yellow (my groomer has a yellow Victorian farmhouse with white trim and deep lavender and green accents, just picked my dog up about an hour ago and had to stop to ooh and ah over the color choices). A midtone blue with a little bit of gray to it will also work, goes nicely with yellow and green, and be a bit more sedate as yellow-green-blue are adjacent on the color wheel. A sort of cool darkish red has potential but that can be trickier. Best to use that in smaller accents, like window sashes. Tiny amounts of black also go well, especially if you have any wrought iron or cast iron accents, but if you use too much there's a potential for the "bumblebee effect"! Something like banding on porch posts bracketing another color (either your major accent or a secondary accent color) would be the best place for that IMO. There are some wonderful books out there to give you inspiration, I've linked a few here. If you can spare the time, popping into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders that has a cafe where you can sit down with a stack of books and an iced tea to look at some pictures is a lovely way to spend an afternoon (especially if it's hot and sticky out!). Victorian House Designs in Authentic Full Color (a publication of the period, to boot) America's Painted Ladies Daughters of Painted Ladies Authentic Color Schemes for Victorian Houses Victorian Exterior Decoration Century of Color: Exterior Decoration for American Buildings, 1820-1920 Exterior Decoration (1885 book intended for a paint counter display!) Old House Colors House Colors: Exterior Color by Style of Architecture Dover Books' Victorian Houses CD-ROM and Book If you have access to a paint brand called California Paints, they have developed some excellent historically accurate color palettes in association with Historic New England (one of the premier preservation organizations in the country). Paint's excellent quality, too. There's a dealer locator on that website. Under no circumstances should you use brown as a major accent color IMO. It is a popular color scheme around here but (sorry to be so blunt!) to me the combination of yellow, white, and brown reminds me of the contents of a used toilet, it's just gross. I'm bracketed on both sides by Folk Victorians with this color scheme and it actually sometimes makes me grateful for the dreadfully bland cream-and-white PO chose. LOL I have a millworker's cottage ca. 1900, which we call it "Victorian Lite" as its Eastlake detailing was stripped away and there are some early Arts & Crafts type elements... I daydream about restoring the shingled exterior and polychrome color scheme. Maybe someday. I would love to see pictures of your house should you wish to post some. I'm sure the Photoshop gurus would be willing to take a crack at it as well, with some suitable buttering-up. ;-)

I recently went through this with my own house (built in 1892 in a large city), and it looks very similar to yours. And given my related education, I went down quite the research hole! First, the years given for eras of architecture, art, and design histories are the popular years — so it is possible for a person to build a Victorian house after it fell out of popularity, especially considering these particular architecture eras (Victorian, Edwardian, etc.) are based on the years of queens and kings (i.e., Queen Victoria‘s reign was 1837 to 1901). But I think there is definitely something to you finding the earlier record and the information about the fire. In my city, they started classification at the year 1900, so homeowners with the year 1900 have to take additional steps to dig deeper for the exact year — I got lucky and found my house with the label “being built” on an 1892 map. Secondly, the use of “folk” and “farm” are generalized terms. The style of your house is Victorian Carpenter Gothic — this is a specific type of the Gothic revival period that took place during the Victorian era. If it would’ve been built in a rural/farming area, then it would more so be referred to as folk or farm, or even Rural Gothic. The Carpenter Gothic house style was extremely popular throughout the US, as the invention of the scroll saw allowed basic carpenters to easily create ornate trim from wood or purchase it from mass-produced options. A general google search for Carpenter Gothic house will yield a ton of results from extremely ornate houses to simpler versions (like your house). I spent so much time looking at examples online to brainstorm the exterior rehab I’m doing, I finally checked out a book from my library called “Storybook Cottages: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style” by Gladys Montgomery, and it’s a great resource of photos and history — I highly recommend it! You can also buy it used on Amazon. And if you want to try and find your house on a map, one of the best sources are Sanborn maps; that’s where I found my house mapped. You can view a lot of these maps on the Library of Congress’s website, and then filter the results for your state, city, year, etc. The Sanborn Map Compamny was based out of New York, but they created maps all over the country specifically for fire insurance companies to use in assessing liability in urban areas — so the maps also include details concerning building materials, number of floors, etc.