A description of Sarum in Charles County is as good a definition of the typical Virginia House as our knowledge presently allows. Those features that mark it and comparable buildings as belonging to the second half of the seventeenth century are three particularly: the tilted false plates, the unmolded tie beams exposed outside along the eaves and indoors across the ceilings, and the narrow riven clapboards used for exterior cladding. By the 1720s or thereabouts we find that these features were generally supplanted in the better sort of houses by thin, flat false plates, beaded or concealed beams, boxed cornices, and sawn weatherboard siding. Holly Hill reminds us that there were seventeenth-century houses in which some of these features were absent, as well as eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century buildings in which they persisted.