Importance of Housing Design Cited
The days are long past when virtually anything thrown to an eager public by a builder working off plans “borrowed” from a competitor would sell quickly. Houses today have to be designed to meet the standards of prospective home buyers with very sophisticated design sense.
At the 41st annual convention here of the National Assn. of Home Builders, it wasn’t surprising to see that design seminars were heavily attended.
Of particular note were sessions conducted by members of the Housing Committee of the American Institute of Architects under the general heading “Design 85” and a program entitled “An American View of Housing in Japan,” featuring builders and a Colorado architect who toured manufactured housing plants in Japan last fall.
Architect Barry A. Berkus of Berkus Group Architects, Santa Barbara and a panelist at a design session with Arthur C. Danielian and Claude Miquelle, attributed much of the design sense to media coverage of architecture. Newspapers, magazines and television have shown people everywhere that good design is not only for the wealthy, he said.
Higher density--and high density is a fact of life everywhere--means that good design is even more important; poor design in a low density single-family detached project can be disguised by rapidly growing landscaping, but poor design in a project with many units can rarely be hidden, he said.
Danielian, founder and president of Danielian Associates, Newport Beach, and Miquelle, founder and head of Claude Miquelle Associates, Melrose, Mass., agreed with his assessment that housing design tends toward fads, the most recent being the unlamented--by Berkus and several other California architects--Neo-Victorian look that apparently sprang to life in Texas.
Just as this pseudo-Gay Nineties look is dying out, so the housing world is seeing endless varieties of a design style that is variously called Cape Cod or New England. It features clapboard siding, light colors--often with contrasting trim--and steep gables.
All three panelists said that they hoped better design would characterize development housing, but a careful listener could detect a note of hope triumphing over reality.
Danielian said that his firm is doing a lot of rental housing, while Miquelle noted that site improvements are the major factor in escalating prices in the Northeast, rather than land and building costs.
Some design trends seen by the panel:
--A few stirrings in the quiescent move-up housing market. The once strong market for houses in this middle area--neither entry levelnor lavishly expensive--has not returned in force but it will be a factor during the remainder of the 1980s. The move-up houses will be built in communities where the potential buyers already have put down their roots, places like Sunnymead and Simi Valley in Southern California.
--Two-story houses are very popular. They take up less land than ranch-style designs and can be created in a variety of styles tailored to particular regional tastes.
--Detached houses are preferable to many buyers over attached houses, even if the detached house is smaller than the attached unit.
The Japanese are coming--or are they?
American builders aren’t making the same mistakes their automobile manufacturing counterparts did a few decades ago. If anything, there has been an overreaction to the home-turf success of the Japanese housing industry--particularly the half dozen or so huge builders who dominate the nation.
Architect Michael J. Knorr, Michael J. Knorr & Associates, Englewood, Colo., observed that the differences between housing tastes in the two nations makes it unlikely that the Japanese will do to builders what they did to Detroit.
The hard costs of building a house in Japan are higher than they are in the United States, he said, and it would be difficult to ship housing over as is done with cars and cameras.
Typical Japanese houses are prefabricated two-story structures with little evidence of the beauty of line and form that characterize the traditional post-and-beam Japanese house. The latter has been admired by architects for generations, while the former often are characterized by awkward floor plans and a lack of features such as fireplaces and garages that Americans have come to take for granted.
On the other hand, Japanese baths are beautifully designed, as are entry ways and other details of the houses.
Surprisingly enough--especially in view of the fit and finish of the rest of the house--the typical Japanese house is poorly insulated and lacks central heating and air conditioning in a country with a climate similar to the United States, according to a Sacramento-area builder Jim Streng, another panelist who made the trip to Japan last fall along with Knorr, David C. Smith, vice president/treasurer of the National Assn. of Home Builders (who will be NAHB president in 1986); Jerry Malloy, a staff vice president of the builder group and Dick Turpin, Times real estate editor, who served as panel moderator.
Other minuses, often overlooked by a superficial rush to praise everything made in Japan, include very little attention to solar energy and unattractive overhead utility wires in new developments.
Streng was impressed with the quality of the houses, along with the fact that five huge builders manufacture 124,000 dwelling units a year, 11% of all housing starts in Japan. With a population about half that of the United States in a country the size of California, Japan produces nearly as many houses in a year as does the U.S., he added.
Malloy said that more than half the housing starts are designed to replace deteriorated housing built right after World War II. Housing is heavily subsidized in Japan, Smith said, and engineering and testing of housing, including earthquake testing, is more advanced in Japan than it is in the United States. Houses are totally engineered and come with 10-year warranties. Too, tiny lots--often only 2,000 square feet in area--sell for $200,000 or more.
