Back on the Porch : New interest traced to children’s play, social action and trend to traditional

When Bill Neill, an independent television producer, went to La Verne city officials two years ago for a permit to extend his porch, they didn’t know what to tell him.

“They said, ‘We don’t have any specs on porches. We have them for patios, but not for porches. We don’t know what a porch is anymore as far as the permits and building codes are concerned.’ ”

Facing few restrictions from the city, Neill went overboard, wrapping his covered porch almost all the way around his two-story 1906 early American farmhouse. He added a belvedere, or attached gazebo, off the country kitchen and a screened-in sleeping porch off a back bedroom.

Neill said his porch recaptures a way of life he knew as a boy in West Texas.

“The real pleasure for me growing up was to sit out on the porch on a cool evening to talk or make ice cream,” he recalled. “You went out on your porch to escape the heat and visit with friends.”

While Neill’s porch is almost the size of Texas, the porch on Pamela and Robert Brady’s new $180,000, 2,100-square-foot home in Highland is an 8-by-15-foot shaded area with just enough room for a redwood table and chairs and fragrant potted herbs of spearmint, sage and thyme.

Each morning, the couple uses the porch for a traditional English breakfast of eggs, bacon, scones and marmalade served on Wedgewood china.

“I had to have a porch,” said Pamela Brady, who emigrated from England in 1988. “I was determined to create a place off the house where I could eat, unwind and enjoy my garden.”

Originally, the Bradys’ Centex Homes model in the Ridgepointe subdivision did not include a porch.

“We went back and customized some of our models with porches because our marketing research was telling us that’s what our buyers wanted,” said Judy Usik, marketing director of Centex’s Southern California Division.

Just what is reviving the public’s predilections for porches--whose space is neither indoors nor out, but always a friendly, protected place for all those who have shared its embrace--elicits a curious range of opinion.

Robert Gable, a professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate School, says a return to porches symbolizes a search for novelty that surfaces in 30-year cycles.

“It’s no different from shifting hemlines or the cuffs on a man’s pants in fashion,” he said. “In architecture, the range of salient features are limited, so we’ll go back and recycle them.”

Gable added that contemporary architecture is moving once again toward a global or communal perspective, and away from the greed and isolation popularly associated with the 1980s.

Similarly, Irene Goldenberg, a family psychologist with UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, said the porch provides a safe place for social interaction outside the family.

“People want a soft, permeable boundary between themselves and their community,” she said. “They want an entry or way to connect with the rest of the neighborhood, if only to evaluate their lives in terms of a larger system of values.”

However, Robert Winter, author of “The California Bungalow” and an architectural historian at Occidental College, believes the rediscovery of the porch simply represents the public’s response to an environmental crisis.

“People are afraid of the cancer-producing sun and the breakdown of the ozone layer,” Winter said, “so they want a roof over their head when they’re outside.”

Architects and builders, whose task is to translate these opinions and trends into people-friendly projects, have their own views on the cultural shift toward porches.

Mike Woodley, a principal architect for Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., California’s largest home builder, which is developing several Southland subdivisions with porches, believes the recession has dictated the renewed interest in porches.

“When times are difficult as they are now,” Woodley said, “people tend to fall back on traditional elements.”

Flat or falling home prices, he notes, are also forcing people to view their homes as places to live in rather than as commodities to sell or trade every few years.

“Homes represent investments in neighborhood, family and children,” Woodley added.

And with children playing mostly in the street or front yard, where they can meet their friends, porches have become observation decks for anxious parents to watch over them.

Consequently, many architects accustomed to designing houses for adults are now taking their directions from kids.

Peter Calthorpe is a San Francisco architect and designer of the pioneering pedestrian-pocket town of Laguna Creek Ranch near Sacramento, which features several styles of porches in parklike neighborhoods.

Said Calthorpe: “If you think about the way kids are, they’re very much involved in porch and front-yard-type activities. They hang around doorways and passages.”

As porches draw parents and their children outside, the streets and the neighborhood also become safer, many porch enthusiasts say.

“It serves as the eye on the street; it actually gives the term ‘Neighborhood Watch’ some real meaning,” said Phil Pekarek, an El Toro-based architect who has incorporated the front porch in Rockfield Development Corp.’s Hartland subdivision in Adelanto, where prices start at about $90,000 for a 1,200-square-foot home.

Porches can also help architects who are trying to improve the energy efficiency of the homes they design.

“It acts as a wind break and shading coefficient,” Pekarek said. “By being covered, the porch shades the windows and cools the air that goes into the house.”

Porches simplify gardening chores as well.

“Landscaping in the front can be kept to a minimum,” Pekarek added. “Just a simple lawn without a lot of shrubs and bushes creates a much nicer looking neighborhood instantly.”

But while architects and builders agree on the virtues and benefits of a porch, they rarely concur on its location, size or elevation and its value in the marketplace.

For example, at Centex’s 554-home Summer Lake subdivision in Elsinore, where 1,400- to 1,900-square-foot models range from $136,000 to $163,000, the project’s designer, architect Bill Hezmalhalch, was very selective in his use of porches.

“The neighborhood loses individuality and variety if you get carried away and put a porch on every house,” he said. “They don’t make a lot of sense where there isn’t a need for heavy shade control or where the space inside the house doesn’t relate to it.

“You wouldn’t want your porch to open up to a kitchen or a bathroom.”

Interestingly, in Centex’s 300-unit Spinnaker subdivision, also in Elsinore, where prices range from $150,000 to $180,000 for 1,900- to 2,500-square-foot homes, Hezmalhalch added a porch in only one of every four models.

“As families grow older and increase their income they tend to leave their front porches and migrate toward their pools and patios in the back yard,” he explained.

In those models where the porch does make sense, its position relative to the street-facing garage must be carefully weighed.

“I think the porch conflicts with the garage,” said Calthorpe, who placed the garages in his Laguna Creek subdivision in recessed slots behind the facade of the house. “From our standpoint, the whole purpose is to begin to play down the car and garage as the primary face of the building,” he said.

On the other extreme, Woodley has struck a compromise with the three-car family in the Marquis model he designed for Kaufman & Broad in Palmdale by placing a wraparound porch on the second level above the garage. “We’ve created a veranda off a bonus or game room,” he said, “which has been a big seller.”

Although the porch--and its relatives the portido, piazza, veranda and gallery--comes in all shapes and styles, it should be at least six feet deep, say the experts.

“If it’s not, then you really can’t sit out there comfortably,” said Pekarek, the designer of Rockfield’s Huntington subdivision in Etiwanda, where half of the 76 units have porches.

Conceding the fact that most California homes are built on concrete slabs, architects are also lowering the height of porches.

“Initially, we raised the front porches up, creating a lot of cost to the builder,” Pekarek said. “Now we’re finding the raised porch 18 to 24 inches out of grade is not necessarily as important as we thought, architecturally.”

Architects have other ways of disguising a porch’s shrinking stature.

“Even though the porch is not elevated, you can define this semi-private space with railings, the roof overhead, etc.,” Woodley said.

While many architects feel that a porch’s slab floor, roof, columns and handrails add expense, Pekarak estimates that porch models cost $2 to $2.25 a square foot less to build than the heavily stylized pink Mediterranean models that have been so popular with builders and home buyers.

“We put all this facade money on the house that nobody ever saw because there was no interaction out on the front yard,” he noted. “You drove into your garage and headed straight for the back yard.”

What value home buyers assign to porches is less clear, according to Tim Unger, president of Rockfield Development, which has recently built subdivisions with porches in Adelanto and Etiwanda.

“I think it’s an amenity if people are comparing houses and everything else is equal,” he said. “But if you charge $5,000 extra for it, I don’t think you would get it.

“Compared with location, the three-car garage, a spacious kitchen, a laundry room, etc., the porch would still be fairly far down the food chain.”

Ultimately, the best places to ascertain the popularity or acceptance of porches will be the new master-planned neighborhoods where they are featured.

In Rockfield’s Etiwanda development, psychiatrist Robert Gordon purchased the $328,000 San Marino model, a white Victorian with 4-inch clapboard siding and a front porch. Yet he says neither he nor his neighbors do much porch-sitting.

“We do things in the front, yard work, watching the kids, talking, but actually sitting on porches, no, I don’t really notice people doing that,” he reflected. “It’s not the style of life so much anymore.”

But just around the corner in the same model, landscaping contractor Richard Reyes says he uses his covered porch all the time. “I even sit out here when it’s raining,” he said.

In Adelanto, John Holt, a McDonnell Douglas machinist who van-pools to work in Torrance, says he bought his Kaufman & Broad California Mirage model for $84,000 without realizing it even came with a porch.

In contrast, Jeff and Jody O’Flahrity, who recently moved from a Westlake condo to Kaufman & Broad’s California Country model in Lancaster, say they are looking forward to dressing up their porch with window boxes, wood railings and wicker chairs.

“I just want a little piece of Mayberry,” said Jody O’Flahrity, referring to the simple and neighborly pace of the fictional hometown popularized in the 1960s television sit-com “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“The porch gives us a choice, that’s our democracy,” architect Calthorpe said. “You can choose to remain private in your back yard or you can choose to be on the front porch in semi-public.

“It just gives the complexity and diversity of living a little more richness.”