HudsonHawk
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 4,382
Oh, I understand why those went bye-bye, but I meant built-in's.
Oops, sorry. Got confused on which comment you were referencing.
Oh, I understand why those went bye-bye, but I meant built-in's.
Oops, sorry. Got confused on which comment you were referencing.
Quite agree with all your observations, Rodney. I see you're down Centralia way. Judging from your comments, it sounds like you've seen too many of the same sorts of newer developments as I have. Just hideous, some of them. The mantra is "Squeeze more houses onto this land and to hell with other considerations, such as which direction the windows face and whether there will ever be more than an hour of direct sunlight per day falling on this postage stamp of a back yard."
As to styles ... I'd prefer these new developments were of a more modernist architectural style. All these faux-craftsman "communities" -- with names like "Quail Run" and "Whispering Pines" -- almost hurt my eyes. The phoniness goes well beyond the names, of course. Maybe they put a bay window at the front and some non-functional gable brackets up under the eaves, and on the sides and back it's T1-11 siding and no window trim at all. Seriously, I've seen more inspired architectural design in doublewide mobile homes.
LizzieMaine: It's the same thing around here. There are two ways old porches tend to disappear. One is they get walled in to be converted to either an unheated room or extra indoor living space. The other way is they get neglected then torn off because they were expensive to maintain so they rot and the family living there wouldn't or couldn't pay to rebuild it.
tonyb: I used to do cable and satellite TV. I've been in far too many of those subdivisions. You're absolutely right. Old houses had decent trimwork everywhere. New houses put it all up front with cheaper materials on the sides and back. I'm stopping there. It's far too easy for me to get rolling on that subject.
Rodney
Here, a lot of our Victorian homes, have all the money up front, then cheaper in back. You will see oak in the front rooms and pine in the back with painted trim. My favorite is, oak forming a square on the surround of the floor, then pine, where a carpet would cover in the middle. My house looks like a mansion from the front, but, once you get past the parlor, it isn't all that big!
I see a version of that in NYC pre-war apartments both inside and out. Outside, the fronts of many of these building will have more expensive stones like limestone or intricate brick work with terra-cotta inlays, etc. and the sides and backs will be simple brick.
Then, inside, the apartments tend to have nicer wood floors in the "public" rooms - the foyer, dining room, living room - and not as nice in the "private" rooms - the bedrooms. Sometimes the "public" rooms will have herringbone patterns and the "private" just straight planks. The apartment I just bought has red oak in the foyer and living room and "just" oak in the bedrooms. We have a copy of the original offering documents and that is emphasized in it. Also, the floors in the "public" rooms in our apartment have a nice border; whereas, the "private" rooms don't. (I'm just glad the original floors are all still there.)
I'm interested in the comments about homes being built beside each other as if that is a new phenomenon or has anything to do with when they were built. This is a function of zoning and lot size. Many historic cities and towns have <5,000 sq ft lots with homes side by side. I'm sure you have all seen them.
I'm interested in the comments about homes being built beside each other as if that is a new phenomenon or has anything to do with when they were built. This is a function of zoning and lot size. Many historic cities and towns have <5,000 sq ft lots with homes side by side. I'm sure you have all seen them.
Most modern developments have minimum set-backs and other guiding principals. In my town, you need 10,000 of lot per bedroom and minimum one acre lots. I understand that different areas have different rules.
Oh, I'm not mistaking densely built neighborhoods for a recent phenomenon. It's the norm in all but the newest American cities -- long-ago built-out urban neighborhoods of packed-in blocks of houses after packed-in blocks of houses.
What has happened in some of the more outlying districts in the Puget Sound region are developments that had been either raw land or in agricultural use until quite recently, and are now cookie-cutter developments with large (three- and four-bedroom, two-car garage, etc.) houses, each hard to distinguish from the one next to it, all packed tightly into these little "communities" surrounded by land still raw or in agricultural use. And they are almost entirely dependent on the automobile, two or three or more per household, hence those large built-in garages.
Growth-management laws are to blame, at least in part, if blame is in order. I'm not troubled by the density -- indeed, there's a lot to be said for it -- so much as the apparent lack of consideration for the placement of the structures and their relationships to each other. That, and the obvious cost-cutting measures, such as the T1-11 siding and the windows lacking any sort of trim at all. I can't imagine that time will be kind to them.
I can't understand the popularity of big houses except as conspicuous consumption. The big houses around here that were built in the Victorian Era were never anything but that -- a signal to the rest of the town that you had Arrived, and were a Force To Be Reckoned With. The town where I grew up was a bizarre mixture of tiny working-class houses dotted with the occasional imposing mansions built by nineteenth century sea captains who had grown very rich very fast and wanted to show off.
These houses are still very impressive today, but they are impossible for a single family to maintain as ordinary single-family housing. Many of them were subdivided into apartments or boardinghouses during the "Homes For Defense" drive of the early forties, and became cheap housing for dock workers, and those that weren't thus altered have, almost universally, been turned into Bed and Breakfasts.
I boarded in one of these places in the eighties, and it had the unusual effect of being smaller on the inside than it was on the outside. The rooms were very choppy, reached by narrow stairways that seemed to have been built into unused closets, and even the living room wasn't much bigger than the one I have now. I think the idea was that small rooms were much easier to heat and use year round than big drafty vaulty rooms.
It's the developers' default mode these days.