A Place to Come and Sit for a Spell : Redecorating: Santa Ana couple add a 1,000-square-foot porch to their home to recapture the peaceful neighborly feel of rural America.
Gregg and Pam Bunch remember the reactions they got when they told their friends they were planning to add a porch to their 71-year-old Santa Ana home.
“You’re adding 1,000 square feet, and it’s not even living space?” one incredulous friend asked.
Gregg, who grew up in rural Indiana, had trouble explaining to his Southern California pals that to him, a porch was indeed living space, a place for some of the most relaxed living of all: sitting on the glider, watching the world go by. Leaning back in a wicker chair and feeling the hot afternoon air cool down at dusk, or cuddling up warm and dry while sheets of steady rain water the lawn only a few feet away, so close you can smell it.
And when the Bunches went on to explain that this would be a front porch, not the de rigueur Southern California back-yard deck or patio, that only added to the confusion. All that work and expense, and no privacy? It just didn’t make sense.
The scoffers were right in a way: The Bunches new old-fashioned porch has turned out to be an ornate 1,000-square-foot welcome mat. But, although it has taken some getting used to, they say they wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The response we’ve gotten has just been phenomenal,” says Gregg. “It’s incredible the number of people who come up and ask if they can just sit on it for a while.”
Not a Saturday morning goes by, Pam says, without at least one or two strangers stepping up--and ringing the doorbell if necessary--to ask about the porch. How old is it? Was the house moved there from somewhere else? Are the plans available?
So predictable are those inquiring visits that the Bunches don’t even try lounging around in pajamas on weekend mornings anymore. They just go ahead and get dressed for the company they know is coming.
But truthfully, they don’t mind the inconvenience, although Gregg admits that all the attention is “almost a little embarrassing sometimes.” Most of the time, they invite their impromptu guests to go ahead and sit a spell if they’re so inclined.
“I’ve made more lemonade since we put this porch on than I ever had in my life,” Pam says.
Since they added the porch, the Bunches have met neighbors they never knew in the 15 years they’ve lived in the house on Holt Avenue. “They’re nice, friendly people, and they’ve always been there; we just didn’t know it,” Pam says. “They’d start by slowing down to look as they walked past, and so we’d wave and say hello, and they’d say hello. Now it’s gotten so that if I spend three hours out front doing yardwork, about half that time is talking to the neighbors. It’s really nice.”
The Bunches are finding themselves recognized more and more often away from home as well. The other day in the checkout line at a local home supply store, the clerk asked Gregg, “Aren’t you the guy who lives in the green house on Holt?”
They’ve also been recognized formally by the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society, which gave the Bunches its Historic Preservation Award for their work.
The wraparound front and side porch is an elaboration on the house’s original, smaller front porch. Being exposed to the elements, it aged faster than the house and eventually fell apart, the Bunches say. They started thinking several years ago of replacing it and researched the idea by driving around Orange County’s old neighborhoods and snapping photos of existing porches, and by reading books and magazines about old houses.
They disagreed on only one major point: He wanted it to be 6 feet wide; she wanted 9 feet. She won, and they’re both glad about that.
“I was just concerned about the added cost,” Gregg says. (Materials for the project ended up costing $10,000.)
“I knew it had to be 9 feet so that we could have a table and chairs out here and still have room to walk past,” says Pam.
Although they came up with their own concept of what it should look like, the Bunches hired C. R. Carney Architects of Tustin to draw up the plans to ensure that the porch would fit proportionally with the rest of the house. “We wanted it to look like it had always been here,” Gregg says.
Gregg and his brother-in-law, Gerry Andrews, did much of the work themselves. Gregg, who makes a hobby of such tasks, designed and made the custom front screen door, and the two men made the handrails, balusters, steps, newel posts and lattice.
To prevent the new porch from suffering the same fate as its predecessor, the Bunches painted and sealed each individual piece before attaching it.
“The weather here isn’t as harsh as it is in places where there’s snow and cold,” Gregg says, “but it can still be a problem.”
Still, the Bunches admit their new addition requires a lot of maintenance. They spend half a day every other weekend wiping and dusting to remove the film that accumulates on it.
Exposure to the elements isn’t the only reason the front porch is in decline nationwide, says Dr. Irini Vallera-Rickerson, an architect and expert in the history of architecture who teaches at Orange Coast College.
Over the past 50 years, she says, we’ve turned our backs on our neighbors, and the styles of houses we built have illustrated that change dramatically.
“We’ve turned inward, and we’ve lost the feeling of community,” Vallera-Rickerson says. “Instead of being open to each other, we project a facade . It’s all image, image, image, in our lives as well as with our homes.”
Nowhere is that more true, she says, than in Orange County. “We even take the isolation to the extreme in many places, with walls and gates around whole communities to lock out the outside world.”
Some experts have theorized that it was the automobile that killed the front porch, turning quiet streets into noisy, smelly, hostile environments and literally driving people indoors or into their back yards. Others say television was a contributing factor, giving us something more interesting to look at than the passing parade of everyday life.
Vallera-Rickerson has her own theory. “I think that the more crowded it becomes out in the world, the more we try to isolate ourselves. When you’re crowded together on the freeway and crowded into a big open-floor-plan office and the houses are so close together that you can look into your neighbor’s window, you just try to shut it all out when you get home. But in most cases, the back yard isn’t private, either.”
With the front porch gone, houses lose the transitional space that once gave their residents a chance to gear down from interacting with the outside and prepare to go into their private space. In many parts of the county, that same purpose is now served in a less friendly way by the area between the locked gate and the front door.
The porch had its origins in Vallera-Rickerson’s native Greece, where the ancient Greeks relaxed in the shade of columned porticoes. The Bunches’ porch could also be referred to as a veranda, a word of Hindi origin used in the 19th Century to describe a wide, roofed, outdoor area along one or more sides of a house.
A porch is what environmental psychologists call a sociopetal space, one that encourages social interaction. Without it, most homes become just the opposite: sociofugal--places that discourage social interaction, at least on the side they show to the street.
Of all places, Southern California should have more porches, Vallera-Rickerson says, because the climate here is perfect for semi-outdoor spaces. “And if you have a small space, a porch can add to that by giving you an additional space that interrelates with the indoors. It’s really a shame we don’t have more of them here.”
