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Thinking about building a house?Catch Up on Your Reading If You're Thinking About Building a House
By Katherine Salant
Saturday, May 10, 2007; Page F12
If the idea of a new house is interesting but not yet something that occupies many of your waking hours, which of the several hundred books on the subject would be the most helpful?
I would start with John Wheatman's "Meditations on Design" (Conari Press, 2000) and "A Good House Is Never Done," (Conari Press, 2002). The books are short, the prose sparse and the focus refreshing.
Wheatman, an interior designer and teacher who has worked in the San Francisco Bay area for nearly 40 years, is much more interested in a house that makes you feel good than in one that merely looks good.
That distinction can easily be lost as you get further into the planning process and become obsessed with floor plans, countertops, paint chips and carpet colors. Of course you want a house that looks good and so does Wheatman. But as you lead your life, your house is the backdrop; you're the one at center stage. As Wheatman might put it, focusing on the look and not the living is like studying the wine glass instead of drinking the wine. You should do both.
Wheatman can be blunt. Resale is important, he says, but not at the expense of enjoying your house. "If you arrange your space for someone else -- a nameless, faceless prospective buyer -- you are cheating yourself out of the comfort of a house that meets your needs now. You may also be creating something bland and boring."
Wheatman can also be practical. "I don't believe in designing dining rooms, I believe in designing spaces in which you dine -- and work, entertain, and other things you might not have thought of yet. You cheat yourself if you design a room for only one activity."
Wheatman's houses are frequently elegant with rich-looking materials, but he writes that when the cost is too high, a rich look can be achieved inexpensively. In one photograph, the limestone-looking floor is concrete "stained gently with cow dung."
Moving from a generalized discussion of "house and home" to a more focused one, my next recommendation is Jeremiah Eck's "The Distinctive House: A Vision of Timeless Design," (American Institute of Architects and Taunton Press, 2003).
Boston-based Eck, who has designed more than 300 houses in the past 25 years, says a house you will love everyday you live in it starts with four considerations:
• Your building site should be factored into the planning from day one. What is the slope? Where is the view, the neighbor's garage, and which way is south?
• Your floor plan should reflect the way you really live.
• Your exterior should reflect the interior (you'll never find an Eck house with a traditional, colonial exterior married to a 21st century, open-plan interior).
• A few well-chosen details that make you feel good should be incorporated into the interior. Eck favors stairs, fireplaces and built-in cabinets and shelving.
Eck is not the first architect to suggest those guiding principles, but few are as articulate or incorporate them to such a good effect. Eck also shows that employing the same principles every time does not mean that the houses will all look the same. Thumb through his book and you see there is no distinct "Eck look." The houses are wildly different and of no particular style. Such stylistic evasiveness marks him as something of a maverick.
In planning the right house for his clients, Eck encourages them to think outside the box. For example, in the early stage of developing a floor plan, he suggests that they give rooms new names that describe their functions. When your kitchen becomes the "gathering-
kibitzing-planning-homework-
reading-television watching room" as well as the "cooking and eating room," you know it will have to be more than a simple galley configuration to meet the needs of your household. When your family room is called the "reading-playing-television watching-conversing-piano practicing-knitting-bill paying-napping room," you will quickly realize that one big boxy space is not the answer.
Eck's houses come in all sizes and shapes. He is clearly as comfortable designing a tiny 616-square-foot vacation cottage on Martha's Vineyard as he is designing a 10,000-square-foot house for the Boston suburbs. Size is not the issue, he says, it's how the parts fit together.
Eck can also be playful. One house pictured in the book has a forest-green shingle roof with two white stripes (perhaps the owners are alums of Michigan State? Or Dartmouth?) and a red brick chimney with a vertical white "zipper stripe" created with white bricks. An interior pictured in the book features elaborate wood trusses and a gray-and-red striped ceiling and exposed chimney.
Once you've grasped Eck's four principles, the next step is putting yourself and your household into the picture. What exactly do you want in a house? What plan configuration and what look will resonate with your inner self?
Though you may hire an architect, you will have a big head start on this project if you have already begun to address your wants large (a house that says "me") and small (a place to contain all the sports equipment that gets strewn around the front hall.)
To get you started, read John Connell's "Homing Instinct: Using Your Lifestyle to Design and Build Your Home," (McGraw Hill, 1998). The author is an architect and the founder of Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vt. (http://www.yestermorrow.org/). The school runs intensive workshops in design and construction for both professionals and non-professionals.
Connell's book is free of jargon and his writing is engaging. To arrive at the right design, Connell says, you need to start with the cosmic questions -- Who are you? Who would you like to be? -- and then gradually home in on a real house. The "Bubbles and Storyboard: Diagramming Your Program" chapter walks you through how to make a bubble diagram. Most architects in their initial discussions use them with clients to illustrate various functional relationships and how the house might relate to the site.
Many architects will caution against thinking about a design before you have a building site, but I think working out which spaces are more important to you and which ones are less so will make the architect's job easier. And once you've established what the spaces and their relationships are, these can be physically configured in any number of ways, depending on the building site you end up with.
A final recommendation: Sarah Susanka's "Not So Big House Solutions" (Taunton, 2002). Read it and you will quickly realize why she has such good rapport with her clients and the general public. The short essays with simple hand-drawn illustrations are easy to follow, and Susanka discusses all sorts of practical issues. For example, what should you do with your grandmother's furniture that holds great sentiment but is grossly uncomfortable and too formal for your lifestyle?
Susanka also exhibits refreshing candor: "Every residential architect will at some point wish he or she had the guts to say, 'You don't need an architect. You need a cleaning service.' "
Katherine Salant can be contacted through www.katherinesalant.com. She is the author of "The Brand New House Book."
© 2003, Katherine Salant
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© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
