If there is a silver lining to the housing collapse, it is that the house-flipping mania is over now. Maybe we can get back to the business of building and remodeling real houses for real people who actually plan to stay awhile. However, designing and building homes for the “New Normal” and the diverse demographics of the home-buying market presents a variety of challenges.
This is a good thing for the green building movement – if homebuyers intend to stay in their homes for longer than the two-year flip cycle, that then creates more of an incentive to build homes that last longer, have healthier indoor environments and use less energy to keep the occupants comfortable. The companion challenge for the design community is to plan homes that meet the current and future needs of the home-buying public in smaller packages than were the norm during the easy credit days. As we are reminded by so many things that surround us in today’s world, good design is one of the primary differences between junk and real value.
The average American home is shrinking. Home sizes have continually expanded for the last 50 years or so, but that trend has now reversed and homes are becoming smaller to improve affordability. Smaller floor plans that are roomy enough where needed but don’t feel unduly cramped require careful planning. Spaces must be tailored and detailed properly to generate the right feel. Good designers shape volumes to comfortably please occupants, not just divvy up areas for furniture. High ceilings in living rooms can dwarf occupants and erode the sense of security and comfort. If any of the three dimensions is exaggerated, it becomes the most powerful characteristic of any living space, so emphasize the horizontal dimension with longish diagonal views through a relatively small space and it feels larger than it is. The opposite occurs when the vertical dimension is predominant.
The new American home plan must be flexible and adaptable. Need a full-on home office? Maybe use a spare bedroom with a murphy bed. A formal dining room with French doors can easily convert to an office or spare bedroom if a dining room is unnecessary. Hallways can even become multi-functional with art displays, gallery lighting, or built-in bookcases – dedicated circulation space should be avoided if possible. Entryways can easily amount to empty unused space since it is usually only the UPS driver that uses it – attractive well-developed mudrooms at the entry from the garage make more sense. Quick dining spaces in or adjacent to the kitchen are more useful to most of us for nightly dinners rather than the dreaded dining room – redundancy is less affordable than ever. As always, custom homes allow homebuyers to design for their individual priorities – we all live differently and designing your own homes allows you to develop the space for your optimum daily lifestyle.
The Gen-X’s and Gen-Y’s are all about multi-tasking and want their homes to do the same thing for them. Their perfect design let’s them cook, wash laundry, talk on the cell phone, check their email, watch music videos on TV, practice yoga, and recycle cardboard simultaneously. Since many of them have no plans to raise children, they have time for all this and seem to actually prefer smaller homes.
Homes are increasingly multi-generational. Maybe Granny has moved in because it has become impractical for her to live alone any longer. A little “apartment” within the larger house structure is just the ticket – hopefully private enough for comfort yet connected enough to not seem like exile. The same notion applies to today’s boomerang kids that leave home for college but then struggle to find work in today’s tough job market after graduation and move back home. (Just don’t make them too comfortable!)
As the Baby Boomers age, more and more of them are going to opt to stay in their homes until Hell freezes over – no stinking Assisted Living, please. So, good design facilitates gracefully aging in place. Wheelchair access to all living spaces can be tastefully achieved if part of the design program from the outset.
The point is that there is no cookie cutter design anymore. Sure, the standard three-bedroom, 2.5-bath format will probably never die, but as time goes on and we live in our houses longer and the world continues to change, we can rightfully ask them to do more for our investment in them. Good design, well-constructed, and we are off to a better flip-free future.
Len Ford is president of Ford Construction Corp, a certified green builder, and chairman of the FBA Green Build committee.