Why
the American house needs a makeover
By Cathleen McGuigan
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 27 issue — Design is everywhere, right?
Your toothbrush, your running shoes, your cool-looking
couch, your latte machine, your laptop. OK, no
one would mistake Indiana for Italy, but you can
finally buy good design almost anywhere, from
the m
all to the Internet. But there’s one
big-ticket item in this country that is virtually
untouched by the hand of a good designer: your
house.
MOST NEW off-the-rack houses aren’t so
much designed as themed: Mediterranean, French
country, faux Tudor, neo-Colonial. These houses
may offer—on the high end—every option
money can buy, from a media room to a separate
shower for the dog. But the market actually gives
consumers little true choice: the developer house,
in most price ranges, is amazingly similar from
coast to coast, across different climate zones
and topographies. If you ripped off the roofs—and
the turrets and gables and fake widow’s
walks—or peered into the windows—double-hung,
round, Palladian, picture (often in the same house!)—you’d
find essentially the same thing: a vast foyer
with chandelier; formal living and dining rooms
(rarely used); open-plan kitchen/family room;
master suite and bedrooms; many bathrooms; at
least a three-car garage.
It makes me wonder whatever happened to the
modern house, and why the core idea of modernism—that
through mass production, ordinary people could
afford the best design—never caught on when
it came to houses. Le Corbusier called the house
“a machine for living in”—which
meant, notes New York architect Deborah Gans,
that the house is a tool people control, not the
other way round. The brilliance of the modern
house was in the flexible spaces that flowed one
to the next, and in the simplicity and toughness
of the materials. Postwar America saw a few great
experiments, most famously in L.A.’s Case
Study Houses in the late 1940s and ’50s.
Occasionally, a visionary developer, such as Joseph
Eichler in California, used good modern architects
to design his subdivisions. Today they’re
high-priced collectibles.
Modernist houses, custom-designed for an elite
clientele, are still built, of course. But when
I recently asked Barbara Neski, who, with her
husband, Julian, designed such houses in the 1960s
and beyond, why modern never went mainstream,
she replied, “What happens when you ask
a child to draw a house?” You get a box
with a triangle on top. A little gabled house
still says “home.”
Yet the cozy warmth of that iconic image doesn’t
explain the market for neotraditional houses today.
Not all these houses are ugly and shoddy: though
most are badly proportioned pastiches of different
styles, some are built with attention to detail
and materials. But, as the epithet McMansion suggests,
they’re just too big—for their lots,
for their neighborhoods and for the number of
people who actually live in them. And why do they
keep getting bigger, when families are getting
smaller? In 1970, the average new single-family
house was 1,400 square feet; today it’s
2,300.
The housing industry says that we want bigger
and bigger houses. But I think they’re not
taking credit for their marketing skills. Last
year’s annual report for Pulte Homes, one
of the nation’s biggest builders, contains
an astonishing fact: if you adjust for inflation,
houses of the same size and comparable features
are the same price today as they were in the 1970s.
That means that if business is going to grow,
the industry has to sell more product—not
just more houses but more square footage. It’s
like the junk-food-marketing genius who figured
out that people wouldn’t go back for seconds
but they’d pay more upfront to get, say,
the 32-ounce Big Gulp.
This year, Pulte predicts, the number of houses
built will be only slightly higher than last year’s.
“More and more of the same might not sound
particularly exciting, but it is,” the report
says. “That’s because houses ... will
continue to get bigger and better, ensuring that
real inflation-adjusted spending on residential
construction will continue to rise.” Bully
for them—and for the folks in the real-estate
and financing industries who base value on size
not quality.
But finally some people are saying “Enough
already.” Sarah Susanka, a Minnesota architect,
started a mini-movement with her best-selling
1998 book, “The Not So Big House.”
Susanka argues that a good architect understands
the importance of human scale. Under the dome
of St. Peter’s, you’re meant to feel
awe. But if your bedroom’s the size of a
barn, how cozy can you get? The eco-conscious
hate big houses, too, with the energy cost of
heating and cooling all those big empty rooms.
And now that McMansions not only are the staple
of new suburbs but are invading older, leafy neighborhoo
ds,
built in place of tear-downs and overpowering
the smaller vintage houses nearby, communities
from Greenwich, Conn., to Miami Beach are beginning
to take action.
Some middle-class people who care about design
have opted out of the new-house market. They’ll
remodel an old house, one with an honest patina
of history that all the money in the world can’t
reproduce. And some architects are hatching low-cost
plans for the mainstream market. Prefab is hot
right now: designs that use factory-built modules
are assembled on-site. It’s much cheaper
than conventional construction, and if it’s
done well, it can look great—and modern.
“We have this concept about design and mass
culture in America, with Target, Banana Republic,
Design Within Reach,” says Joseph Tanney
of Resolution: 4 Architecture, which won a Dwell
magazine competition to design a cool house in
North Carolina for only $80 a square foot (a custom
house would be $200 to $400 per). The house is
prefab, and the firm has half a dozen more in
the works. Seattle architect James Cutler (who
designed Bill Gates’s Xanadu) is working
with Lindal Cedar Homes, a national builder, to
adapt a wood-and-glass modernist house for modular
construction. “I think there’s a return
to an interest in modernism,” says New York
architect Deborah Berke, “and I would call
it warm modernism, not sleek minimalism.”
She argues that a younger generation, steeped
in a love of cool design and loft living and ready
for a first house, isn’t going to buy a
mini-McMansion. “That’s where the
industry is not reading the social signs yet.”
As more people get into design—even starting
with a toothbrush—the more they’ll
want their houses to reflect what they value.
Flat roof? Peaked roof? It doesn’t really
matter: the best design reflects who we are and
the time in which we live. Who knows what our
grandchildren might come up with if someone hands
them a crayon and says “Draw a house”?
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