Residential architecture style in New England leans strongly toward tradition

glennmagusharvey

i.e. stuffy colonial floor plans, old-style crown mouldings and rails and doorframes, heavy and dark-colored-wood furniture, etc.

In other words, they don't really like contemporaries, big open rooms, high/vaulted/cathedral/etc. ceilings, and the like.

At some extremes you get this:
This is supposed to be a house built to look (and feel, apart from the amenities) like a historic-style house.

Forzare

>>In other words, they don't really like contemporaries, big open rooms, high/vaulted/cathedral/etc. ceilings, and the like.

I live in Connecticut and this sounds like my houses

glennmagusharvey

Well, there are some, but they're few compared to the many capes and colonials all over the fucking place.

Also, they don't make small ranches or capes anymore.  All the new constructions are for huge colonials or condo/apartment complexes.

Evergreen

Ah, the history of residential architecture. One of my favorite topics ever, as you guys probably know right now.

Small houses are basically a thing of the past, yes. Hmmm...let me think about all this...

Basically, the dominant or distinctive trends in this region over time were, starting in the 60's...

-That very ordinary kind of semi-traditional look of 60's and onwards colonials. Gradual lessening in popularity of splits. And raised ranches start appearing everywhere.

-70's are kind of similar, but then the contemporaries start showing up and are built en masse mostly from late 70's to mid-80's. They continue sporadically into the 90's, while raised ranches become less incredibly popular.

-Late 80's to early 90's is the return of capes and colonials but they're rendered in a rather stark, modern way. The traditionalists hadn't fully taken over yet. I kind of like this era.

-From mid-90's onward, traditional themes become the norm, especially at the pricier end of things. This is my childhood and onward into adolescence. And it shows no sign of really going away.

As Glenn demonstrated...those fucking imitation saltboxes. Why?! Dark, unappealing...and yeah, blatant historical fakery! God knows there's enough real ones around. Anyone who would buy something like in the OP has no respect for history!

Meanwhile, at the lower levels, raised ranches continue to be built almost exactly the same as they've been done for decades. Say what you will, but the format does have some advantages. It's just hard to ever make it elegant...

Anyway, looked through the OP video a bit more. Thoughts: See, I don't want to live in an old house. I don't find that appealing and I especially don't find old houses appealing because...well, I sort of believe in ghosts...but yeah, in general, I want something brighter and airier and more guaranteed to be sturdier. Architecture changes for practical reasons too, y'know. To imitate what was normal a couple hundred years ago isn't necessarily best by any means.

AHR

I don't get it.

The ceilings are a bit low, and the patterns are tacky, but it looks like your average house, if with a barn.

Evergreen

The idea is, it looks like your average house from the 1700's. And it seems like Glenn and I both don't like brand new houses that aim to perfectly imitate something several centuries old. You get things like, yes, ceilings that are lower than standard. And a garage that's trying to look like an attached barn, which isn't even historically accurate.

Look, this is not meant to be an insult, but if you simply see this as looking like an average house for our part of the country, then you probably don't have a detailed eye for residential architecture. The so-called colonial style that has been popular throughout most of the 20th century to the present in most of America is modeled in a broad sense on the house in the OP video, but unlike that house it adapts and changes along with trends and advances in technology. There are definitely major differences between a 1700s saltbox (the technical name for the type of house in question here) and the various styles of colonials from about the 30's to today.

I mean, does your house specifically resemble the one in the OP? How old is it?

glennmagusharvey

No it doesn't; I live in a modern colonial, built in the 80s; the one in the video is just an extreme example of old-fashioned-ness.  Though my house is...well, pretty typical as far as colonials go, except a few less common (but not really all that uncommon) features, which barely change the floorplan from the traditional every-room-formally-by-itself layout.  It's also got annoyingly dull colors; the previous house I lived in had white walls and lots of windows and open space and was much brighter, while this one likes various shades of brown way too much.

...come to think of it, there really isn't much difference between colonial floorplans, apart from the exact location of rooms.  The general idea of having formal and very rectangular for everything is pretty consistent from one house to the next, and it's generally speaking just a matter of width and length; high ceilings, open foyers, "open floor plan" connecting multiple rooms, etc....these are all rare.

Also, wallpapers.  For some reason, people like wallpaper around here.  I won't ever get why.

That said, I do prefer the non-colonial styles.  Colonial is my second-least-favorite, next to cape, though I admittedly haven't seen capes much.

Raised ranches (or what my mom calls "bi-levels") are nice because they tend to have staircases in the middle of the house and thus are more unifying between the two floors than, say, colonials with their very strict floorplan and separating walls.  They also hide the garage elegantly, especially if you have a corner lot.  But they don't give you a real basement space, even if they're built on a plain.

I prefer split-levels and contemporaries.  Split-levels, while they rarely have huge rooms, are rather unifying with their half-level staircases--nothing's ever very far away.  Contemporaries tend to have the huge great rooms.  Though some conts also seem to enjoy showing a large amount of roof toward the front of the house--it's like looking at a person with eyebrows so bushy and hair so long it covers a big part of their face, which I don't like.

Evergreen

My question was actually directed at AHR. But anyway...this is interesting...I'm so glad to have someone other than my mom to discuss this with!

I grew up in a late-80's colonial myself, but we extensively renovated it over the years. In ways I now realize are ridiculously late-90's. I'm sure the next owners gradually changed a lot themselves. Does your current house have brown-well, ok, unpainted-interior window trim and moldings and such? 'Cause that seems like it was big in colonials from 70's-early 90's, then largely disappeared. And wallpaper is...yeah, my mom prefers paint too. And hardwood floors. She doesn't like carpet much, vastly prefers wood with rugs and such. She is...discerning, let's just say.

The huge roof thing on contemporaries kind of bothers me. I don't find it very appealing. Interesting analogy with the hair thing there. 

My current house is a cape, a superb example of the whole modern traditional thing. Built early 80's, added onto mid 80's to give it a new garage (therefore incorporating the previous one into the basement) and a sort of private den (wood-paneled!) and finally, above that, a new master suite with jacuzzi tub, separate tiled shower, and the bedroom has huge windows and skylights. 

It stayed with those owners for a while. When we bought it in 2000, the previous owners had been the first or second after the add-onners and had made some key renovations, namely a new kitchen and extensive built-in cabinets in the room off the kitchen. We have made many more in the ensuing decade. The kitchen was further enhanced with granite countertops and a new tile backsplash. The dining room was given nice wallpaper and a huge enhancement of the fireplace. The kitchen and room off of it were repainted, from white to a light yellow. The powder room was eventually fully renovated...hell, we got every single bathroom eventually, most recently mine, which has a yellow and black theme. Some upstairs rooms were painted a pale green...the paneled den got permanent surround sound and a new TV cabinet...the basement was recarpeted (actually one of the first changes, that place was terrible at first), and so on. You'd never know how old the house is now, I dare say. 

It's set in the side of a hill and thus appears to be a full 3 floors from behind, but much smaller from the front. It's dormerless, there's just a really long hallway with a row of closets running down the length of the second floor. All rooms on that floor have rear windows and mostly don't go all the way through to the front, so we don't need dormers!

glennmagusharvey

Interesting that you live in a modern cape.  I don't see many modern capes around here for some reason; capes are mostly tiny 50s-era capes interspersed with tiny 50s-era ranches.

Don't you feel that the large roof profile of a cape also looks a bit ugly?  Though with dormers it does look charmingly house-like I guess.

Curiously, when we moved here back in 2004, my favorite house out of all our house-hunting was a cape.  Though it was basically a colonial in the style of a huge cape, with four dormers and a huge family room off to the side.  (The garage was also tucked neatly beneath said huge family room.)  We didn't buy it though; my mom preferred the neighborhood we're in now.

Evergreen

I was going to show you a very interesting house in Bloomfield, but it seems to have been sold!

So I have another idea. Watch for a familiar thread to make an appearance...