Learned amateur architecture in our country antedates our republic. From the builders of early manor and plantation houses, who followed the latest pattern books shipped from England, to celebrated amateurs such as Gabriel Manigault of Charleston and Thomas Jefferson, Americans with limited or no professional education in drafting or engineering have fancied themselves architects in the European tradition, erecting along the way some of the most celebrated buildings and, in ensemble, towns in the country. In and around Charleston, South Carolina, a vestige—or perhaps a revival—of that practice continues today. Witold Rybczynski, an emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, in his latest book, Charleston Fancy, engagingly tells the story of a group of like-minded friends whose understanding, curiosity, and whimsy fit squarely within this very American tradition.

We are first introduced to George Holt, a self-taught contractor with an art historian’s understanding of the neoclassical. His house, a Byzantine fantasy hidden in the middle of a city block, had just gone up in flames right before Christmas 2015. So Rybczynski’s book is part memorial, one in which he reveals how this strange small house, with its domed living room and colonnaded indoor pool, and its neighbors came to be. Tully Alley, what Holt and his friends dubbed the driveway-cum-street they developed, became their fantasy of a Mediterranean town, as each friend designed his house in the style he preferred—one a Roman villa, another with a Moorish veranda, and others built to fill the