While you may not live in a vintage home with an architectural pedigree, you can give your house a history lesson with new-fangled but old-fashioned windows.In response to a national passion for historic-looking homes, window manufacturers are making more windows based on designs from the past than ever before. Pick almost any architectural era and you can find a window to match.

Gothic, Tudor, Arts and Crafts, Prairie Style, Victorian, Italianate, Georgian, Colonial — they’re all out there. Like movies based on novels, they are more likely to be close approximations or loose interpretations than line-for-line reproductions. That’s still good news for people who live in antique houses and seek to restore them with close-to-original elements.

But it may be even better news for those of us living in run-of-the-mill ranches, cookie-cutter Cape Cods and assembly-line tract homes. It means we, too, can put in the kinds of classic architectural elements the builder left out — without having them custom made.

Manufacturers such as Simonton, Weather Shield, Pella, Marvin, Andersen and others are making vintage-style windows in stock sizes. You can buy them off-the-rack at your local lumberyard, home centre or window store or order them out of a catalogue. If your house already has standard-size windows (which is very likely the case), you may well be able to replace them with a minimum of structural work.

Or, no structural work at all. Some national window manufacturers are now offering removable grilles or mullions in historic styles specifically designed to fit their existing windows. Windows with mullions or grilles are known as “divided-light” windows. “True” divided-light windows have mullions between individual panes of glass. Snap-in mullions approximate the look. They are placed on the inside of a window, making a single pane of glass look like multiple panes. While less authentic in terms of construction, removable mullions make window washing easier.

In terms of mullion style, evenly spaced rectangles or squares are often associated with Colonial-style windows, diamonds with Tudor-style, and arcs with Gothic. Small squares bordering larger rectangles can signal Arts and Crafts style.

Err on the side of restraint when choosing historic-style windows, particularly if your house lacks a clearly identifiable architectural style. Some vintage window styles — Palladian, say, or Georgian — are simply too grandiose for generic homes.

On the other hand, if your house has a clearly recognizable architectural style, go with windows from the same period. Mixing styles from different periods almost never works.

Then again, not every window in the house has to match (though compatibility is important, especially street-side). You could, for example, turn an open porch into an English-style solarium with divided-light French doors and windows, even if the rest of your house has conventional double-hung windows. Good-quality windows, regardless of shape, style and finish, are big-ticket items. History doesn’t come cheap. Prices for even modest-sized windows start in the hundreds and escalate into the thousands. Professional installation, naturally, is extra. Choose well-constructed windows with insulated glass (that is, two panes with air space between) and superior weather stripping. Compared to actually buying an antique home or building a reproduction, adding a vintage-style window or two can be an affordable and satisfying way of bringing history home.