Stucco repair costs in Fort Wayne

Fort Wayne's housing is fairly young. Only about 15 percent of the city's homes were built before 1940, Census estimates show, and the median home dates to 1972. Across the metro, about one in four homes went up in 2000 or later.

Some of the city's older stucco sits in its early 1900s suburbs. The Brookview-Irvington Park Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2011, has houses walled in wood weatherboard, brick and stucco, in styles running from Craftsman and Prairie to Colonial and Tudor Revival. Some were designed by Joel Roberts Ninde and Grace Crosby, women architects whose supporter Fred Shoaff helped run the Wildwood Builders development company.

One house there shows how much detail a stucco wall can carry. The Howard and Gladys Rohrbach House on Terrace Road, built in 1935–36 as a model home for the News-Sentinel newspaper, has stucco walls, smooth stucco quoins at the corners of its front gable and long, thin insets in the stucco that echo the lancet openings of the style's European models.

Details like those are formed by hand. If a quoin chips or an inset cracks on a house of that age, look for a plasterer who does ornamental repair, not just flat patching.