Tag Archives: single-family homes

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?

Trading in a McMansion for a McCottage doesn’t stop criticism

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One firm argues that the trend toward tiny houses may simply be a shift from McMansions to “McCottages”:

Not to rain on the parade, but let’s have a reality check. Small, very small and microhomes – ranging from 800 or 900 square feet down to 100 or 150 – may be a new trend, a fad, or just the subject of some clever marketing by their builders.

“The McCottage is replacing the McMansion as a home status symbol as more homeowners look to save money and reduce their impact on the environment,” says HSH Associates, the mortgage data firm. While national figures are hard to come by, or don’t exist, HSH quotes builders who suggest microhomes will be the next big thing…

If you’re building a weekend or vacation place, smaller is cheaper and better for the environment. But the HSH story says many people are building microhomes alongside their main homes as an alternative to a more traditional addition…

Finally, consider that the microhome fascination may be a passing fad that will leave owners with white elephants when fashions change in a few years. While many people scoff at the McMansion today, pressure to display wealth and keep up with the Joneses often returns when economic conditions improve. Just think about how people go back to SUVs and trucks when gas prices fall.

This argument suggests there are several ways tiny houses and McMansions are alike. With the prefix “Mc” before mansions and cottages, there is a suggestion that these are simply mass produced. Whether the home is big or small, mass produced is bad. There could be two issues behind this. First, there could be issues with the architectural quality and integrity. In other words, you could order one of these tiny houses out of a catalog, order it, and tow it into your backyard as could thousands of other people. Your tiny house is not unique.

There is a second issue with the mass produced nature of these houses: there is the possibility they are simply a fad and not a lasting trend. A savvy consumer doesn’t want to fall prey to these trends and simply follow along because it is a “status symbol,” even if it is a greener or cooler status symbol than a McMansion. This suggests that a buyer/owner needs to have more legitimate reasons for acquiring a tiny house.

Overall, it appears people unhappy with McMansions and who could get behind tiny houses may just have to fight similar negative generalizations.

 

Housing design judge on homes getting smaller, greener

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Housing design judge Heather McCune recently talked about two trends in the housing industry: smaller and greener homes.

The exteriors of the homes are getting far simpler, with far fewer gables and dormers.

There are a couple of reasons for this, we think: One is that this is a change that’s driven by cost. Every time you add a bump-out or change a roofline, it adds to the cost of the house. Builders and architects seem to be consistently asking themselves, does a change like this add value, does it add to the cost? So, the appearances are becoming more streamlined.

The other thing is a generational shift. The entry-level buyer is demanding a home designed for their aesthetic, not for their parents’ aesthetic. They seem to prefer a far cleaner presentation than what had been popular among their parents. I don’t think it would be out of line to characterize it as an anti-McMansion attitude…

Honestly, [“green” is] an evolutionary term in our industry. The definition of green is as different as each and every builder in each and every category. But we didn’t see a single entry that didn’t discuss its “greenness” in its entry statement. The industry is figuring out that green, in some form, isn’t an option anymore — now it’s simply mandatory.

But they each approach it their own way, and a lot of the builders and designers are participating in the many green-building rating systems, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which may emphasize different systems and concepts. Generally, though, what we’re seeing is that reducing energy usage is becoming an aspect of home maintenance, from the homeowners’ point of view. We saw less emphasis on sustainably produced building products than on energy management.

Housing going relatively smaller and greener. These trends seem to be picking up momentum and shouldn’t be a surprise (see a recent headline that suggests that here) to readers of this blog. For example, this housing judge was part of the most recent International Builders Show where a Gen Y home combined a smaller size with outdoor living.

It seems like cost is a big factor here: a larger home or a home with more “unnecessary” features means a higher purchase price while some want to lower home energy costs (some going so far as to have net-zero-energy homes). So perhaps we can infer that if the economy remains in the doldrums, these two features will continue to gain steam as homebuyers think more economically.

Net-zero energy homes: well-designed and/or eco-friendly?

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Three net-zero energy homes, homes that produce as much energy as they consume, were recently built in a well-off Edmonton suburb. The description of the homes leads me to ask: are these homes both well-built and eco-friendly?

Well lit with large, south-facing windows, the feature home offers a simple yet refined open plan for the kitchen/main room where the festivities were held.

In each room, labels here and there denoted the latest eco-friendly features and breakthrough methods of energy and resource efficiency. Particularly notable were the 75-cm thick walls, especially designed to provide insulation for Edmonton’s chilly winters.

Although not excessive in size, the house is open and spacious and has all the amenities needed for a modern lifestyle.

As Boman described to the assembled guests, one of the great appeals of the home is the sense of place that comes with it. It is “not another McMansion,” she quipped.

I’m very intrigued by the quote at the end of the above excerpt: it suggests that the homes are nice and eco-friendly. It would be interesting to hear more about the particular architectural details of these houses and how much they differ from homes that are built as part of larger subdivisions. The quote suggests the homes are known for being better quality, places rather than spaces in urban sociology terms, in strong contrast to McMansions. On the other hand, the homes have a lot of green features. Going green doesn’t necessarily make it a well-designed or a quality house. If you pull these two ideas apart, is a ugly or mass-produced green house better or worse than a beautifully designed but wasteful house? Which of these qualities are more important and how do builders and architects have to balance these two to sell such homes?

Apparently there is some momentum for these homes – see my post last week about the cost of net-zero energy homes.

Who is going to pay for those architect-designed plans for the suburbs?

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In reviewing the “Foreclosed” exhibit at MoMA, Felix Salmon raises an interesting question: who is going to pay for these projects to be built?

Anybody who visits the exhibit can see that nothing remotely along the lines of the buildings being proposed is ever going to be realized — Orange, New Jersey, for instance, is not going to replace its roads with long strips of narrow housing. But what’s less obvious is the way in which all of these projects are also a huge financial stretch. They were charged with coming up with innovative forms of home finance, but all those innovative solutions tend to boil down to the same basic idea: get the local municipal government to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and then spend that money on a massive housing development which will, somehow, generate the income needed to service the debt.

Such ideas have a tendency to work much better in theory than they do in practice; they’re fragile things, at risk from dozens of different directions at the same time, and if I were a local bank, I’d stay well away from funding them. And I certainly would never advise small and unsophisticated suburbs like these ones to get into bed with the sharks peddling municipal bonds and associated interest-rate derivatives.

Michael Bell, in the video above, makes the very good point that architecture and architects are largely absent from the suburbs. But I guess that I was really looking for something much lower-cost than the mega projects that the teams in the MoMA show came up with. Certainly lower in up-front cost, anyway. The foreclosure crisis was caused by people borrowing enormous sums of money and then finding themselves unable to pay it back. The last thing we want to do is risk repeating that all over again.

The reality is that few houses in the United States are designed by architects; I remember seeing a statistic a few years ago that suggested it was roughly 5-10%. There are plenty of other people who think they can design them, such as builders or engineers or Menards. A couple of issues could be present here. Adding an architect to the homebuilding process includes another person that needs to be paid. If you are a builder who is hoping to  Some designs might be considered “too modern” for many suburban neighborhoods that tend to celebrate bland or known styles. This is the  reason you can get stucco houses across the country – people know these but are more skeptical of modernist homes.

The funding is another matter. Salmon suggests that few municipalities should enter into such deals in good or bad economic times. However, where else could people get money to build innovative projects? If government isn’t going to front the money, would private lenders (either well-off banks or wealthy individuals or foundations who want to get into real estate or put their stamp on the physical landscape. Without funding, how much more likely are we to get “normal” or “tried and true” projects and how then do we push things forward in architecture or urban design?

Putting together the “IKEA house”

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Popular Mechanics looks at how the new prefab “IKEA house” was designed:

Russell started Ideabox in Salem, Ore., more than six years ago, but he suddenly gained a following—thousands and thousands of emails in just a few days—when he unveiled the first-ever Ikea-inspired prefab home at a Portland home show last week. Contrary to what you may have read in the blogosphere, the Aktiv house isn’t actually from Ikea, sanctioned by Ikea, or in any way sold through Ikea. However, the folks at the local Ikea in Portland certainly played a major role in coupling Russell’s love of small-space prefab buildings with Ikea’s design-savvy, space-saving systems. The collaboration yielded a home filled entirely with Ikea products.

As generations of cramped apartment-dwellers can attest, part of the Ikea allure (besides the fact that its furnishings are cheap and pack flat) is that the broad range of design options lets you get the most out of a small space. For example, Russell says, the variety of Ikea kitchen options gives customers design flexibility and the ability to mix and match Ikea products in the space, choosing for both style and cost. He designed the 745-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom home around specific Ikea components, and the designers from the local Portland store worked directly with Ideabox to ensure the builders had all the parts they needed (there was no room for the frustration of a missing bolt on a commercial-scale project). In all, he says, building an Aktiv will cost about $86,500…

The major difference comes in the delivery of the home, forcing designers to engineer the structure for travel. “When you are picking up the house and driving it down the freeway, sheer loads are very important,” Russell says. Thus, the house, just like a car, must be built with as unified a body construction as possible, ensuring that the home stays together in the face of winds on the highway, or transfers from the production shop to the truck or from the truck to the foundation. “There is a little more stealth factor,” Russell says about the sleekness of the design.

Once the home gets delivered and is safely resting on the foundation, it is as close to a “plug-and-play” model as possible, requiring only hookups to the water, power, and sewer connection points, since all the wiring and plumbing was already done in the production facility. From there, the customer is free to walk into their new Aktiv space.

The house looks decent enough and I’m sure the connection to IKEA will attract many. However, I wonder who would buy this: as some of the commenters have suggested, is this basically a fancier mobile home?

In some ways, I think this house isn’t innovative enough. A couple of thoughts:

1. What about having a neighborhood of these? How would that look and would people want to live there?

2. Can it be expanded or is this the one-bedroom for the living alone culture?

3. I’ve always been really intrigued by the 250 square foot living spaces that are featured in the IKEA stores. Why not work with a really small space (and you don’t have to go to the really small size of a tiny house) and be more innovative?

4. People can already buy smaller homes from a variety of sources – for example, you can buy the materials for a 1,471 square foot home from Menards (from the most recent weekly ad):

Granted, you still have to put the home together and it doesn’t have the IKEA name but the Copeland does have two floors and three bedrooms. So why go for the IKEA house?

h/t Instapundit

Not much of a price premium for net-zero-energy homes

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As more homebuyers seek out green homes and want to reduce energy bills, they can purchase a net-zero-energy home for a price that may not be as high as you think:

The Spencer’s new home is part of a niche, though growing, segment of the U.S. housing market — net-zero-energy homes, many of which use solar energy to achieve net-zero-energy use vs. consumption. In the sun-sparse days of winter, energy consumption often exceeds generation, but in the sunny days of summer, energy generation often far exceeds consumption.

As of February 2012, 37 homes have been rated net-zero-energy or better on the industry-standard Home Energy Rating System e-scale of the U.S.-standard auditor. This number could grow 1,000 percent or more in 2012 if projects continue as planned.

“Interest has been off the charts,” said Todd Louis, vice-president of Tommy Williams Homes, the Florida-based building company that built the Spencers’ home. So far, the company has built and sold four, and has plans to build 35 to 40 more in 2012. The price of their net-zero-energy homes are still $30,000 to $40,000 higher than those that are not net-zero-energy, said Williams, but that margin is dropping with a decline in photovoltaic costs. The Spencers paid $250,000 for their home…

Shea Homes has long featured extremely energy-efficient designs, though the upgrade to solar panels could be costly — around $30,000, said Asay. He and his wife were considering the upgrade, but when the announcement was made that the new net-zero homes, with solar, were only $7,000 more than the previous base model, they jumped: “Sign us up.”

This approach is different than another housing approach that has generated buzz: passive houses are homes that are so insulated that they use a ventilator to move air from inside to outside (and vice versa – see some diagrams here). The energy costs in these homes are very low. In contrast, net-zero-energy homes have higher energy costs than passive homes but then offset the energy usage. In this article, the homes have solar panels (I wonder if this could be done in other ways – wind turbines on the roof?) which also means that the homes have to be in climates and locations with more sunlight. If the costs for doing this are reasonable and introduced completely at the beginning (meaning it can be spread out across the life of a mortgage), I could see how this is attractive for homebuyers.

I expect that we will see more homes like this in the future: beyond wanting to reduce energy bills, more homeowners appear to be interested in green homes. The housing industry is starting to warm to this idea and there are a number of ways that new homes can adapt: more sustainable materials, being a passive house or a net-zero-energy house, downsizing or right-sizing, and being in denser neighborhoods where homeowners can drive less and use less land.