Redefining ‘style’ in home design
‘TRADITIONAL’ AND ‘MODERN’ DESIGNS ARE COMING TOGETHER
In 1984, a young architect said to me (back when I, too, was a young architect): “We build “Contemp-alonials” — Colonial on the outside, Contemporary on the inside.” That sentence conveys the reality that, for homes, “style” is a means to an end. That means marketing in real estate.
It is challenging to sell a very expensive thing. The more costly any item is, the more marketing is needed to find a buyer. The most expensive thing almost all of us need is our home. Whether we rent or purchase, the place we live consumes a huge part of what we earn and what we are worth.
CNBC notes that Connecticut’s average home price is $681,279, putting the Nutmeg State in the top five states of home cost. So marketing becomes even more important when it comes to selling a home.
The “brand” of a home is problematic because each home is its own place. Large “developments” of tract homes offer a community of conspired value and values, offering an image that is easier to market, but the days of carpet-bombing instant neighborhoods with cookie-cutter homes have not been seen in Connecticut for over a decade.
Instead, in terms of freestanding homes it is a “one-off” world where each place has its own provenance, set of features, age and community. But even those stats, now overwhelmingly present on websites like Zillow, are not enough to market these risky purchases.
“Style” becomes real estate’s version of “Ford” or “Tesla.” “Contemporary,” “Colonial,” “Victorian” or “Arts and Crafts” are completely loaded with prescribed aesthetics, materials, spaces, layouts and even values. As an architect for over 40 years, I can state this aesthetic shorthand only serves to make the fully human home a trivializing cliche.
No other being here on Earth has a home that extends what humans value into a place — where we live. When “style” takes
our idiosyncratic and personal lives that we try to manifest in our homes, and overrules it with clichés, we deny our humanity.
There are two types of designers in the public perception: “modern” and “traditional.” Both, now, simply apply established rules to effect visions that create knowable outcomes. Midcentury “Modernist” architects bridled against such preconceptions and were shocking in their rule breaking. They had few clients and many leaking flat roofs, but now “Modern” is just another “style.”
But that is not the way some people think. Lee Calisti, an architect from Pittsburg, writes a blog “Think Architect” and he bewails “style” rejecting the pigeonholing of “Traditional”
“THINGS ARE CHANGING, AND WE ARE CHANGING TO ADAPT TO A DIFFERENT MARKETPLACE. IN THE LAST 10 YEARS WE BEGAN TO ASK QUESTIONS.”
or “Modern”: “I like the idea of personal style — you write your own rules and can thereby break them without apology... as architects we have a mantle to define that, but there are architects who offer the Burger King “Have It Your Way” service to their clients, builders build what sells.”
But most designers find a place in these names to the point where “style wars” are manifest in publications, schools and conferences where “classical” and “innovative” are held as opposing ideologies. It is easy to “go along to get along” and simply refine and apply a defined “style,” but it misses the essential point of our humanity — who we are.
But some people are listening. Arnold Karp, who created Karp Associates in New Canaan, has been a builder for 30 years. His firm has just been selected to create the 2019 “This Old House Idea House” in New Canaan. Through a few building cycles, he has come to understand that “style” should be more personal than polemic.
“Things are changing, and we are changing to adapt to a different marketplace. In the last 10 years we began to ask questions,” Karp says.
Karp decided to open his team to include an architect, Robin Carroll, as director of design and residential construction at Karp Associates. Rather than simply accept drawings by others, or opt for stock plans that proliferate on Houzz and other websites, Carroll sees that the easy answers of building what has been built before won’t work in the 21st century.
“The accessibility of clients to information, that it is harder,” says Karp. “Styles are converging. People want extremely traditional exterior, but a fully open interior.” Sound familiar?
“It used to be that our forefathers had large flat tracts of land where homes were built around New York City. Now there are more varied sites with grades, rock outcroppings, huge trees and we use them.” says Karp. Stock plans are based on no site. So when personal “style” and unique sites are what is available for homes to either be adapted to, or built with, the rules shift from “product” to “design.”
But that perception is hard to market. When we are conditioned to buy a Mac computer or a Starbucks coffee, the shift to thinking that the only way to make the extreme cost of home ownership worth the risk is to take the time and courage to trust that a home may not fit nicely into a category is a leap of faith.
The reality of unavoidable risk and the literal changing landscape of home ownership makes that faith inevitably necessary.