Tag Archives: single-family homes

Recent uptick in sales of McMansions?

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Here is an argument that new home sales of recent months might be driven in part by larger homes, sometimes known as McMansions:

Data released on Wednesday shows that sales of newly built homes rose 3.3% in April from a month prior and 9.9% from a year ago. While the figures do not disclose the size of these new homes, home builders credited the McMansion side of the spectrum. That’s a reversal from recent trends: During the recession the size of homes got smaller, shrinking 3.4% to 2,382 square feet, according to the US Census. But last year that size jumped 5.2% to 2,505 – the largest in at least four years. In many regions of the country, homes are even larger.

Home builders say the trend toward larger new homes picked up more this year. Michael Villane, president of Lead Dog Builders, a custom home builder in Rumson, N.J., says he’s currently building homes with sticker prices of $1.5 to $4 million, up from the $1.3  to $1.5 million his clients were commissioning a year ago. While the average size of homes in the region is 3,500 to 5,500 square feet, he says the orders he’s received this year are for 7,000 plus-square feet homes. Though there’s no official definition of the word, many define McMansions as new homes larger than 3,000 square feet.

In some cases, home builders are enlarging homes even if clients don’t ask for it. Michael Dubb, CEO and president of The Beechwood Organization, a New York-based home building company, says his firm is building houses with larger kitchens, higher ceilings, and overall more spacious rooms in an attempt to appeal to buyers who might be on the fence about buying a new home. By building bigger without raising the price, he says, the company is hoping to increase its sales. (He says they’re not downgrading quality, but rather cutting into their profits in order to make more sales.)…

Requests for large new homes come at a challenging time for the overall new home market. New home sales hit a 51-year low of 307,000 last year, according to the NAHB. That figure is expected to jump 18% this year, but it would still be way off its peak of 1.3 million homes in 2005.

If I had to guess at what is behind this, here is what I would say: there is a bifurcation in the current housing market. On one hand, you have a large group of potential homebuyers who are looking for smaller homes. One recent book I reviewed calls this the “demographic inversion” as young adults and retiring Baby Boomers look to downsize and purchase in denser areas. Proponents of these trends argue that the Americans of the future are looking for a different kind of homeowning experience in the future. On the other hand, you still have a decent number of wealthy homebuyers who are now moving out of a hibernation stage brought on the economic/housing crisis several years ago. They are looking to buy homes similar to what they would have bought ten years ago but now feel financially stable enough to pursue this.

The article doesn’t mention this but I wonder if this is also at play: new home sales are at the lowest stage in 51 years so this new push for larger homes among the wealthy is really raising the average in a way that we haven’t seen in the past. When those at the lower economic spectrum get back into buying homes (though some would argue that they won’t – perhaps we’re moving to a rental society), the average figures for the whole country might come down or stabilize a bit.

Builders constructing denser, more urban developments in the suburbs

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USA Today reports that more builders are constructing denser suburban subdivisions:

The nation’s development patterns may be at a historic juncture as builders begin to reverse 60-year-old trends. They’re shifting from giant communities on wide-open “greenfields” to compact “infill” housing in already-developed urban settings…

“It’s the kids (ages 18 to 32), the empty nesters (Baby Boomers with no kids at home),” says Chris Leinberger, president of Smart Growth America’s LOCUS (Latin for “place”), a national coalition of real estate developers and investors who support urban developments that encourage walking over driving. “These two generations combined are more than half of the American population.”…

Most major builders have created “urban” divisions in the past five years to scout for available land in already-developed parts of cities and closer suburbs — even if it means former industrial and commercial sites or land that may require environmental cleanup…

Even traditional communities built on greenfields are transforming. In Southern California’s Inland Empire, an area where housing prices are lower and appeal to first-time buyers, Brookfield is building Edenglen in Ontario. The homes are built on smaller lots — 4,500 square feet instead of the more conventional 7,200 square feet — and priced from $200,000 to $300,000.

This phenomenon has been noted by a number of commentators in recent years though I wonder if it will last.

A few other consequences of this for suburbs:

1. How will existing suburban residents respond to dense, infill projects? I would guess that a good number of suburbanites would object to these dense projects being built near them, spoiling their neighborhoods.

2. Related to the first question about NIMBYism, how will these new developments change the character of existing suburbs? If a community is used to wide suburban streets and big lots, narrow lots and denser housing could change things.

3. This article hints at this but this could also be a product of the age of many American suburbs. Outside of the suburban fringe or exurbs, many suburbs not have at least a few decades of history and perhaps little to no open land (reaching build-out). If these suburbs want to continue to grow (boosting revenues and fees as well as prestige), infill development might be the only choice.

4. This article makes a common claim: certain generations (emerging adults and baby boomers) desire more urban kinds of housing. However, I wonder if it less about generational differences and more about the changing structure of American households. Is the increasing number of single households (which might be located more in these generations) really driving this? If so, this would be have bigger effects as the American suburbs have traditionally been communities build around family life and child-rearing.

When a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Wilmette is threatened by McMansions

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McMansions don’t only threaten the unspoiled fields of America; they also threaten houses designed by notable architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

A dollar can’t buy you much these days. But for Joseph Catrambone, a contractor, real estate manager, and self-proclaimed architecture buff living in Oak Brook, Illinois, one dollar secured him a 594-square-foot historic Prairie Style cottage, churned out by Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in its 1920 heydays. The only caveat: He has about two weeks to devise a plan and acquire the permits to dismantle and remove the building from its present location. “I wake up in the morning thinking how crazy I am,” Catrambone told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s exciting and crazy all at the same time.”

Exciting, crazy, and heroic. Catrambone’s plan to relocate the cottage from its original site has saved one of two endangered Frank Lloyd Wright-connected buildings in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette from imminent destruction. The cottage, which currently sits on 1320 Isabella Street, was designed by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler, who was working in Wright’s studio at the time, propagating the American architect’s patented style before striking out on his own as a prominent modernist architect with an entire platform frame system attributed to his name (the Schindler Frame)…

As soon as talks of demolition began, alarm bells went off. Preservationists swiftly entered the scene, tracing the two buildings back to Schindler, Van Bergen, and Wright and meticulously unearthing original blueprints that would qualify the works as Wright creations. While any Wright association is usually enough to earn a reprieve for buildings facing ruin, Wilmette, unlike Chicago, does not have a landmark ordinance. Like the recently razed Palos Verdes beach house built by Lloyd Wright, Wright’s son, the Isabella Street houses are sitting on prime real estate for aspiring McMansion owners.

Fending off the stereotype of the big, bad developer, Hausen opened the door to the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Together, they arrived at an agreement, which placed the Van Bergen-designed house on the market for four months starting on May 1 at a listing of $599,000. The Conservancy is taking careful measures to monitor potential buyers, determined to find a future owner who will preserve the existing residence.

This sounds like a decent compromise: the homes are saved (though moved) and property owners and builders can utilize the prime property.

I’m sure there are some fascinating stories out there about preservation battles over structures like these. Why weren’t these homes given landmark status? Why do some towns move to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright homes and others do not? How much of a Frank Lloyd Wright home does a structure have to be to be worth saving – this home simply came out of his workshop.

Also, if an important building is saved but moved, is it still just as important?

Building houses designed for blended families

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Architects, real estate agents, and builders are adjusting to selling more homes to blended families:

“More and more people are getting divorced, especially in Paris and its suburbs. We have many customers in this situation. We try to interest them in a certain type of home,” admits Alexandre Colleu, a real estate agent working in suburbia. In France, one out of five children live in a blended family. In Switzerland, more than 22,000 divorces were granted in 2010; the figure has been increasing steadily for the past few years. “Separations are increasing, but so is the speed at which couples find new partners. They are not a market yet, but they’re a target population,” confirms Yankel Fijalkow, author of The Sociology of Housing. “Real estate agents have now found a way of selling homes that would be too expensive for a single family,” he notes. At the National Architecture School in Paris, where Fijalkow teaches, masters-builders and architects are working on the issue: “They are studying the housing models of countries from countries where people live with their extended family rather than within nuclear families,” Professor Fijalkow explains.

Each blended family is different. Some homes are organized so that each generation has their own space– whereas in other houses, people are separated according to family groups. Let’s go back to the aforementioned “nine-room house”. The estate agent describes it: “It is made of two detached houses linked by a footbridge. The couple who wants to preserve their newly-found intimacy can live in one house, and the children in the other. Also, children of blended families are often teenagers who appreciate the idea of having their own private space,” he adds.

Sibrine Durnez, an architect in the Belgian city of Liège, has designed a house with two very separate levels. “The parents did not want to live in a sad, empty house on the weeks when they don’t have custody of their children. So from their floor, they can’t see the kids’ rooms. They also wanted all the children’s bedrooms to be exactly the same size, to avoid jealousy,” she explains, adding that her firm mostly designs small houses for single-parent families.

Other families chose to allocate a part of the house to each “clan,” where they share some rooms but sometimes have two different front doors. The most radical version of this is a perfectly symmetrical house, with a double kitchen and a double living room, which can be separated or joined according to the mood of the day. “It’s important to be able to spend time with each other, but it’s also important to be able to ‘avoid’ each other,” Yankel Fijalkow explains.

This sounds like an interesting adaptation to the Going Solo world: even in families where adults have decided to live together, the emphasis in these homes is on private space where each individual can adjust to the changing family circumstances.

It would be really interesting to hear from families that live in these homes. Does the design help promote family togetherness? In other words, is it more important to simply have the different family members living in the same dwelling than interacting on a regular basis within the dwelling? What happens if families grow closer together and want more common space – do they have to move?

Comparing the mass-produced ranch to the mass-produced McMansion

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I’ve recently seen several articles about the ranch house (I discussed Atomic Ranch magazine a few weeks ago) but this one, “Ranch housing style makes a comeback,” led me to thinking why the mass-produced ranch may be popular and the mass-produced McMansion is not. Here is a brief explanation from the article:

Cicaloni is not alone in her appreciation for the ranch. Though it will never be as popular as the ubiquitous Colonial here in New England, the ranch is making a return. The simple home is being embraced by young people attracted to the mid-century modern vibe; by aging boomers who no longer want to deal with stairs; and, as always, by those looking for an affordable home…

“Popular publications portrayed a confident and easygoing way of life that could be accessible to one and all; of particular interest was the casual California lifestyle, implying prosperity, glamour and optimism as embodied in a sunlit and breezy ranch house where indoors and outdoors blended effortlessly,” Betsy Friedberg of the Massachusetts Historical Commission wrote in a 2003 issue of Preservation Advocate. “In the 1950s, I think, [ranches] were considered fresh,” says Zimmerman. “They were built at the same time as Capes, which looked very traditional. If you were a person who was up to date and interested in the latest thing, then, yes, a ranch is the thing you would have chosen in 1952.”…

BUT EVENTUALLY, thanks to tract housing like in the infamous Levittowns, people didn’t see the charm anymore. The 1962 song “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive through a postwar development in California, ridiculed the conformity: Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same…

But the other thing is that taste in homes, like fashion, is cyclical. “All building styles go through a period when they are unpopular,” says Zimmerman. “At one point, Victorian houses were thought of as white elephants and hard to heat and not set up for modern living and not in tune with the landscape. So, in the ’60s, we lost a lot of Victorians.” And so, the ranches often derided as “ranch burgers”?—?as in mass-produced by a fast-food chain?—?were replaced with homes that came to be known as “McMansions.’’

So it’s simply a matter that ranch houses are on an up-cycle? It is somewhat amusing to think that these simple houses could be an antidote to an era of supersizing house size and debt.

I’m sure some critics of suburban houses would argue that ranch homes and McMansions share several important characteristics. To start, they are associated with sprawl and tract subdivisions. McMansions may be an easy target today but there were plenty of critics of the Levittowns and similar subdivisions built after World War II. In this sense, the problem may not be with the homes themselves per se but rather with the way of life that promotes building mass-produced houses. Second, both ranches and McMansions are not prized for their design or architecture due to their mass-produced nature as well as their unpleasing aesthetics (though these differ: ranches are meant to be more simple while McMansions are meant to impress or be flashy).

It would be interesting to see figures about how quickly housing stock is replaced in the United States. For example, how many ranch houses were built and how quickly were they replaced? What can this tell us about how quickly McMansions might be replaced?

McMansions are symbols of “the excess of greed”

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An interesting way the term McMansion is sometimes used is to see such houses as symbols for some larger issue in our culture. This usage is illustrated in a documentary to be shown next week in Vancouver:

Vancouver’s treasury of modern architecture is the subject of Coast Modern, by Michael Bernard and Gavin Froome (May 8, 7 p.m., Vancity Theatre).

“Coast Modern is an exceptionally beautiful film,” says Woodend. “I have a bit of a yen for modernist architecture, just because it’s so exquisite, and it’s one of those films [that takes] house porn on a whole new level.

“Although, to give it credit, it looks at architecture as a manifestation of social values. [It has] Douglas Coupland weighing in on McMansions, and how they’re sort of this travesty, not just in architectural terms, but as an embodiment of cultural and social values, the excess of greed that has come out of the last 10 years and shown up in brick and mortar.

“In that regard it’s pretty thoughtful, it really uses architecture as a means to talk about culture.”

From this point of view, houses are not just things to be purchased by individual buyers. Rather, homes and their architecture represent broader trends in society. McMansions can then be viewed as symbols of excess, products of an era where people consumed more than they needed with impunity. Presumably smaller homes indicate (whether they are tiny or “not-so-big“) fighting back against this culture of excess.

Of course, labeling a home as a McMansion then does the job of pointing out the excess. If you live in such a home that acquires this label, do you try to respond that the home really isn’t that excessive? Or perhaps that it is green enough (perhaps a tactic of celebrities)?

The exterior vs. the interior of the Brady Bunch house and architecture in TV and movies

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The managing editor of Entertainment Weekly makes an interesting point regarding a famous house in American television: the exterior shots of the Brady Bunch house don’t match the interior shots.

And I grew up obsessing over a particularly brazen TV blunder: The exterior and interior of the Brady Bunch house do not match. At all. Not one bit. In case you never noticed: The interior set depicts a soaring two-story home with the second story over the structure’s right side; the outside is a low-slung split-level with a second story over the left side. (In fact, the second-floor window was fake.) How could they let this happen? Sherwood Schwartz once explained to the Los Angeles Times that the San Fernando Valley house used for the exterior shots was chosen because “we didn’t want it to be too affluent, we didn’t want it to be too blue-collar. We wanted it to look like it would fit a place an architect would live.” In other words, the exterior struck the right emotional note for audiences, and logic be damned. I can live with that. In fact, audiences will forgive almost any lapse in logic if the story does its primary job well – and that is to move us, scare us, tickle us, and give us characters worth knowing. The Brady house made no sense, but I still wanted to live there. And while it may not be necessary to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the San Francisco Airport (unless you’re coming from Sausalito), it makes for a nice aerial shot loaded with symbolism. The best purveyors of pop culture know that poetic truth trumps literal truth every time.

Six thoughts about this:

1. I’m not someone who looks for or particularly cares about inconsistencies in movies and television shows. And yet, this still seems pretty egregious: the sides of the house don’t even line up?

2. Is this house really befitting of an architect? Would any architect worth his salt really want to admit that he lived in a stereotypical split-level? While some might defend the ranch as an exemplar of post-World War II American life, are there people who defend the split-level?

3. The explanation from Sherwood Schwartz is very interesting: the home is supposed to invoke a certain American middle-classness. Another way to think about it is the home is supposed to invoke a particular emotion and then fade into the background.

4. I bet there would be a fascinating study in looking at TV and movie depictions of American homes. As Juliet Schor suggested in The Overspent American, the “middle-class house” on TV has really gotten big and more luxurious over the years.

5. The exterior of the house is interesting but what about the astro-turf lawn?

6. It can be a little bit strange to visit these television homes on the set. Two years ago, we toured the Warner Brothers studio and saw a number of sets. Here are three shots: the emergency room exterior for ER, Lorelai Gilmore’s house on Gilmore Girls, and their oft-used street scene.

After seeing these in person, I imagine there is some room for commentary about the reproducibility of more modern architecture, the impermanence of place, and how it can easily transition from one film to another TV show to a miniseries and so on…

Argument: growing income inequality reflected in “unseemly” larger houses

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In his new book, Charles Murray (not a sociologist) apparently makes the case that the “unseemly” big houses in the American suburbs today reflect growing levels of income inequality:

He begins by noting that the distribution of income was far more compressed in 1963 than it is today. Back then, the median family income of professionals and managerial occupations was only about $62,000 p.a. in today’s dollars. Less than 1% of American families in 1963 had incomes higher than $200,000 p.a. and only 8% had household incomes higher than $100,000 p.a. (again, all figures in today’s dollars).

The housing of the time reflected the same degree of compression. Even the elite didn’t usually live in what we think of today as a mansion. He recommends viewing an episode of Mad Men to see the sort of house – remarkably modest by today’s standards – that the Drapers live in. That, he says, is “the kind of house that the creative director of a major New York advertising agency might well have lived in”.

In 1963, great mansions were something most Americans saw in the movies, not in person. Only the richest suburbs of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had entire neighborhoods consisting of mansions.

The nature of the change since then can be seen by driving around suburban neighborhoods where the affluent of the 1960s lived, such as Chevy Chase, Maryland; Belmont, Massachusetts; or Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Most of the housing stock remaining from that era looks nothing like the 15,000- and 20,000-square-foot homes built in affluent suburbs over the last few decades. No reproductions of French châteaux. No tennis courts. No three-story cathedral ceilings.

Interesting argument. I wonder if some other factors might also be at play here.

(1) Perhaps people today are more willing to spend their wealth on impressive houses. This could be the case if homes have become more important markers of status since the 1960s.

(2) Perhaps home builders weren’t building these types of homes on a large enough scale for more wealthy Americans to access them. The early 1960s is not that far removed from the under 1,000 square feet Levittown houses and the big builders (as opposed to more local or regional builders) were just taking off. In other words, there was no Toll Brothers yet. Additionally, you need lenders who would be willing to service more mortgages for bigger houses.

(3) Overall, all American homes increased in size over this time period. The average square footage of a new home was 1,660 square feet in 1973 and peaked at 2,521 square feet in 2007. It could be true that the top 10 or 20% of houses have really increased in size but on the whole, all new homes have gotten bigger.

(4) Another factor that might be overlooked here is that the wealthy in the 1960s tended to live with other wealthy people in suburbs or subdivisions and this is likely still the case today. Sure, Don Draper might have had a smaller home but Draper still lived with white-collar professionals. Even if their house sizes have really ballooned, one issue is that the wealthy still live apart from other Americans. Perhaps we should be more concerned with residential segregation than just the size of homes.

The Thomas Kincaide housing development in Vallejo, California

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With the recent passing of Thomas Kincaide, one columnist takes a look at a development in Vallejo, California built with Kincaide’s name on it:

Named the Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, it promised residents a “vision of simpler times” with “cottage style homes that are filled with warmth and personality.” Its slogan: “Calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure.”…

The homes in the Village look a lot like other tract homes in Hiddenbrooke, but with Kinkadean touches such as steeply gabled roofs covered in faux-slate tile, gingerbread trim, front porches and stone facades.

Residents see their homes and neighborhood as unique and distinctive.

Teri Booth, an original owner, says she bought her home because “it didn’t look like every other McMansion.”

Homes here average 2,400 square feet. The four models were named after Kinkade’s daughters – Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett. The styles might be described as pseudo Victorian, pseudo French provincial, pseudo New England cottage and pseudo arts and crafts.

The streetlights (electric) look like Kinkade’s gaslight logo and the walkways (stamped concrete) resemble cobblestones.

This reminds me of the Disney-built Celebration, Florida and Martha Stewart homes. Some homebuyers are looking for a distinctive house, a world of not “every other McMansion” but rather a Thomas Kincaide McMansion! (Interestingly, this article suggests that the Kincaide homes are a pastiche of styles, a common complaint about McMansions. These homebuyers also seem to like being tied to a famous person or company. Perhaps this is reassuring or perhaps it means that there might be a bigger market for the homes as they are distinctive. (Alas, as the article suggests, home prices in a Kincaide neighborhood can fall as well.) The Village also seems to promote nostalgia and traditional neighborhood life, as do many other developments and builders.

Why have just a painting when you can buy a Thomas Kincaide house?

Smaller luxury homes: “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

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Two home builders in Tennessee explain that they are building smaller luxury homes:

The luxury homes being built by Castle Homes are smaller than just a few years ago, Looney said.

“Not 8,000 square feet. Now the average is 4,500 square feet,” he said.

The custom home Colclasure is completing in Green Hills has about 3,700 square feet, and the open design almost eliminates hallways.

“The days of the McMansion with 6,000 square feet and you live in 2,000, the days of people wanting those houses, are long gone,” Colclasure said. “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

This is a decent reduction in size: moving from 8,000 to 4,500 square feet is a 44% drop while going from 6,000 to 3,500 square feet is a 42% drop. At the same time, these are still large homes. Most new houses do not have 4,500 square feet and even 3,500 square foot homes are 1,100 square feet above the 2010 average. Is this enough of a size reduction to not have these homes labeled as environmentally unfriendly or McMansions?

I really want Colclasure to explain what he means by this final statement: what does it mean for a large house to “make sense”? Does that mean that the large houses of ten years ago don’t “make sense” even if today’s builders built those same homes? Does this mean that luxury homes now come with more features rather than just size? Does it mean that builders have grabbed onto the idea that they can’t just sell impressive size?