A week or so back I got a call from a favorite client, someone I’ve worked with through many projects over many, many years. This particular call told me just how many- his daughter and son in law are renovating a house and he asked if I could help with their planning. I was honored, touched and a little bit depressed. I’m that old, I’m helping the next generation. There’s a wake-up call.
As I start to work with yet another generation, I’m thinking about changes to our idea of “home” in the span of years from our grandparents to our kids; the kind of houses we plan, build, desire, and remember…
The past fifty-plus years brought radical changes in how and where we live, much of that happening in my own lifetime. I grew up in the city (Brooklyn to be exact), and watched as my childhood friends joined the “diaspora” to the suburbs in the sixties, leaving sidewalk chalk and handball for swingsets and bicycles. That great flight outward was fueled by economic, technological and social changes, not the least of which was a combination of visionary (and insensitive) land development on a grand scale, which turned farmland to subdivisions linked by superhighways, all “driven” by our romance with the car. In the years since those early suburban developments, the shape of our lives has changed, and with that, our dreams of "home."
I was talking to a friend recently about his childhood Christmases at his aunt’s house on Long Island. The biggest room was his aunt’s bedroom. Somehow, magically, on Christmas day, the bed was disassembled and a table for twenty took its place. Now, THAT was a resourceful hostess. Talk about a multi-purpose room. Of course, one wonders where the bed was stashed while they all ate lasagne?
Volumes have been written about the post-war Levittown “Cape”. That first mass-produced “dream house for the common man” (because he could actually own one), was a little more than 800 square feet, included 4 rooms and a bath on the first floor and, if budget allowed, a couple of dormered bedrooms on the second. Coming from an apartment in Queens or Brooklyn, this felt positively spacious. It had a special nook for a TV built into the staircase (presuming you could afford the TV.) If there was a basement, and it was relatively dry, you slapped up paneling and stick-down linoleum and called it a rumpus room (what exactly was the rumpus?) No powder rooms, libraries, family rooms, guest rooms, master baths, dressing rooms; no game rooms, wrapping rooms, media centers, home theaters. No gazebos, no gates, no pool houses, no three car garages. If there was a pool, it sat above ground, leaked and wobbled when 15 kids dove off the metal surround, and the over-chlorinated water killed anything growing within 20 feet. A little crowded? Sure. Imperfect? No question. But it was home.
The American “dream house” certainly morphed over those fifty years, along with our other possessions, and nary a new home in the nineties was built without the requisite Jacuzzi (rarely used because it takes a full tank of hot water unto itself) and a vaulted two story foyer with a chandelier the size of a small helicopter. Just heating that space is an engineering marvel of orchestrated ductwork. Then try furnishing it… sectionals to sleep twelve, armoires like little castles, and baby grand pianos that play themselves because no one had time for lessons. The scale was impressive, and a little daunting. How much was too much? What kind of art, short of a Pollack, fills a 30 foot wall?
Will we rethink the need for that? Apparently we already are- as the “baby boomers” retire and we want less stuff to worry about, we’re downsizing in droves, moving to planned communities and looking for someone else to worry about lawn care. I’m wondering how we’ll “repurpose” those palaces when we’ve all retired to the two bedroom condo in Renaissance Estates…
It’s good that we slow down and think resourcefully. I’m getting a lot of that today from those of us who are finally remembering, yet again, that it won’t always “go up”, and maybe we don’t need it to. But we do need and want our space to be special, functional, and reflective of who we are. So how do we make it that way without doubling the square footage, or without disassembling the master bed a couple times a year? Because clearly there’s a middle ground, and one hopes it’s not the Seventies split level.
I spend a lot of my time renovating those post-war homes- capes, splits, center halls. The edges of the subdivisions have blurred and the sameness that was a hallmark of suburban development fades as successive generations place their imprint on the original “bland box”. It’s a real treat to walk into houses that retain their “fifties” or “sixties” identity and we look to see what can be done to make them work with our lives today.
Lesson one in design school, at least of my generation: form follows function. Some will say that’s dated and debatable, but there is definitely a hearkening back to purposeful design.
But what does that mean? The tendency in tight times is to be strictly pragmatic, but we want more from our homes, or I’d be superfluous. The lesson of Levittown is that we turn the “little boxes on the hillside” into places for personal expression. (Ironically, an untouched Levittown house is now a highly prized museum piece. Who would have thought?) It’s actually great fun to look at the imagination of those transformations- from Greek Revival to Gothic Modern, columns, turrets and all, sometimes on the same house.
We look to our spaces to reflect ourselves, and they say as much about who we are as the car we drive or the clothes we wear. Form and function still do work together; It’s a matter of unifying need and expression, whether it’s picking a paint color or ripping out walls. Somewhere between the Levitt Cape and the McMansion there’s a happy balance that’s big enough to fit our needs, considerate of the environment and adaptable to changes in our lives. Maybe in this next generation we’ll get it right…
