Parade feature home tips scales
One thing Steve Allen would like to make clear is that scaling down doesn’t necessarily mean scaling back.
Case in point: His AllenStyle feature home in the Spring Parade of Homes.
It’s at 3909 NW 166 Terrace in Princeton Parke addition, just off NW 164 west of Portland Avenue, listed at $265,000, and it packs a lot of style into a trim 1,752 square feet.
It has three bedrooms, two baths and a three-car garage. It’s among more than 100 homes open for the parade, which winds up this weekend with homes open 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Guides with maps and more details are available at metro-area newsstands.
“This is our representation of luxury living on a smaller scale,” Allen said, leading a band of visitors through the living room.
A lot of people are scaling down, he said, trading in their larger luxury homes for
smaller ones. “But what they don’t want to give up are the luxury features they may have had in their bigger homes.”
The beamed cathedral ceiling helps open up the living room and kitchen space. Glass doors open out onto the patio, where a fireplace stands ready for entertainment. Both the interior and the exterior feature a mix of wood and stone, the exterior enhanced with soaring crossbeams over the entryway.
Details throughout the house add to the luxurious feel, including a plush master suite — “We wanted to give it that luxury hotel feel,” Allen explained — with artisan tile work flooring the master bath just beyond.
No detail is too small. Lights at floor level under the cabinets in the kitchen offer a less jarring option for latenight snackers, and even the woodwork on the wall behind the bench in the mudroom is unique. Strips of weathered wood are laced together in a one-of-a-kind accent.
“Those are reclaimed wood from the pallets are our work sites,” Allen said.
That may look like wood flooring underfoot, but it’s actually incredibly realisticlooking tile.
“A lot of people want the warmth of wooden floors, but they don’t want the hassle and the maintenance,” Allen said. “This gives them that warmth.”
Classic, but modern
That’s one AllenStyle hallmark: making what’s old new again. For example, the classic panel doors throughout the house hark back a century in style, but their black finish confers a more modern feel. It’s all part of a style designed for the long haul, contemporary living anchored on decidedly classic bones.
“We like to build the base of our home classic so that it will not go out of style when the homeowner wants to resell it,” Allen said. “What might go out of style possibly might be light fixtures, some of the decorations and furnishings. But the base of the house, if you will, we want to be classic so that you don’t have to do any major remodels to get it updated at any time.”
Princeton Parke, which Allen is developing as what he calls a “boutique neighborhood,” will ultimately contain 55 houses.
“Our objective with this type of boutiquestyle neighborhood,” he said, “is to bring back what neighborhoods used to be like when people actually knew each other and they talked, they conversed, walked outside at nighttime and hung out, those type of things.”
The gated neighborhood is in the Deer Creek school district and will include amenities such as a pond and a nature walk, all designed to draw neighbors out to meet neighbors.
“A lot of times in these big, expansive neighborhoods, they just don’t do that anymore,” Allen said. “People don’t know their neighbors, so we’re trying to do something kind of quaint.”
It’s attracting buyers from both ends of the spectrum. “We’ve got people who are in the move-up house, moving up from a starter, and people who are downsizing from their bigger houses,” he said.
The parade’s other featured home, built by The Roberts Group, is at 16413 Rhone Drive in the Camden Park neighborhood off NW 164 just west of Western Avenue.
Parade tickets are free and can be downloaded from ParadeOf HomesOK.com or can be picked up at any parade home and registered through the website. Visitors who get their tickets scanned at at least five homes are automatically entered in a drawing for a $1,000 gift card to Metro Appliances and More.