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Wednesday, February 14, 2001 Historical Concepts wins Southern Living award By MONROE
ROARK
Longtime Peachtree City architect Jim Strickland and his company, Historical Concepts, were recently honored by Southern Living magazine for the design of a Greek Revival house in South Carolina. The house on Spring Island, near Beaufort, was recognized with a 2001 Southern Home Award in the magazine's February issue. The design was praised for combining historical detail with modern lifestyle accommodation, according to one of the judges. This is not the first time a national publication has spotlighted the work of Historical Concepts, which has been in business in Peachtree City since 1982. Strickland moved to town in 1975 and originally operated a firm that also was in the building business, but design and architecture are what he loves the most and he has specialized in those areas with Historical Concepts. His firm, which has a staff of 21, literally works on projects across the United States, going as far as California. A great deal of their work is in South Carolina and Florida, as well as North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia. Historical Concepts does not simply houses, however. The company creates themes for entire communities an "architectural language," as Strickland likes to call it. His was one of five firms selected by Disney in the 1990s to come up with the plan for Celebration, a master-planned community in Florida near the other major Disney sites. Seaside, another community built in past ten years that was featured in the Jim Carrey film "The Truman Show," also bears the Historical Concepts stamp. Much of the company's present work is at Spring Island, site of the award-winning home mentioned above. It is being developed under a trust that will encourage low density, meaning a few hundred residents on an island of a few thousand acres, Strickland said. Many of Historical Concepts' clients in these areas live in the northeastern United States, and word-of-mouth over the years has built to the point where some clients are now willing to wait six or seven months until Strickland's firm can get to their projects. He has also done a considerable amount of work in Peachtree City, including North Cove and St. Andrews Square. Strickland himself spent 11 years on the city's Planning Commission in the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s. "Peachtree City has been good to us," he said. Motorists driving south out of the small Fayette town of Brooks can see another example of his company's work a giant English Tudor-style home on each side of the road. What made that even more unusual, Strickland said, was the fact that the owner of one of the homes was in her eighties when she commissioned them to undertake the project. After several years of crisscrossing the country to oversee all of these projects, Strickland is now passing more of those duties down to his staff, which is jokes consists of "all young turks except me." He now looks forward to spending more time in the office doing actual design work. Historical Concepts is located on Prime Point in Peachtree City, behind the Dairy Queen and across from the McIntosh High School athletic fields. Their phone number is 770-487-8041.
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