COLUMN ONE : Suburbia’s Dream House Goes Casual : The TV has become the nation’s new hearth and family rooms replace formal rooms, reflecting America’s desire to spend more time at home.

A power struggle is raging inside the new suburban houses of Southern California with plenty of implications for American life and family activities. But it has nothing to do with teen-agers’ hormones or household finances.

The strife is over floor plans. It pits the fireplace vs. the television, the formal living room vs. the flop-on-couch/watch-videos/eat microwaved-food family room. And the television--especially the big-screen job--is winning hands-down.

The result is a redefined American Dream House. In the past five years, recession-battered builders have catered to changes in consumer habits, social trends and new technologies in an era of video games and VCRs. Informality has replaced rigid decorum as busy dual-career households pursue personal comfort over fancy hospitality. The new house is increasingly seen as a place to live for a long time, a retreat from a hostile world and depressed real estate market, rather than as a quickie trade-up.

Most dramatically, formal living rooms are shrinking in size and usage while family rooms--entertainment centers that merge into open kitchens--are growing to huge physical and emotional dimensions.

“It is a symbol of the times changing,” said Brian Catalde, president of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California and an executive with Santa Monica-based Paragon Homes. “I think there’s been a tendency to get away from a family sitting down and talking. We, as a society, are so influenced by television that people now are used to conducting family affairs with the television going and not thinking anything about it.”

To be sure, television has dominated many American homes since the 1950s, and dens and family rooms have long been popular. But in recent years, the need to accommodate big-screen televisions has started to dictate architectural decisions in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago, industry leaders say. The TV-centered layout in what has grown to be the largest room represents the ultimate enshrining of video as the new hearth of America.

“The one-eyed monster always gets his due,” said Irvine-based architect Clark Forest Butts, who has designed many tracts around California. Meanwhile, the living room--once a symbol of status and culture--”has just dropped off the face of the earth,” he said.

A four-bedroom model Butts designed last year for a Cypress development has a 12-by-12-foot living room that in ways functions like a lobby while the family and television room is twice as big, not counting the open kitchen and eating areas. In one Newport Beach tract, his floor plan offers a super-family room three times as large as the living room.

And in other middle-income subdivisions with marketing titles such as Oasis, Seasons and Chateau, the master bathroom and dressing area is often larger than the living room to meet a preference for personal comfort over formality.

Those trends are on display in most new suburban housing developments from the beige stucco tracts in Lancaster’s desert flats to the red-tiled roofs in the seaward hills of San Diego. Like many trends that find initial acceptance in Southern California, the changes are being embraced nationwide.

Shifting economics and lifestyles contribute to the new designs, according to people who are planning or studying the new suburban homes.

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With IBM relaxing its dress code and President Clinton publicly discussing his underwear, informality has so conquered American life that many people are unsure how to use a formal room anymore. The simultaneous rise in dual-income households and single-parent families leaves less time for sit-down dinners and leisurely Sunday visiting. Fears of street crime prompt some families to stay in. Plus, new video technologies offer so much more to watch at home, often more cheaply than going out for entertainment.

“I have been to very few formal dinner parties lately. Everybody has potlucks and barbecues, and this lends itself to that,” Judy Chandler, an executive secretary, said of the large family room in the two-story, four-bedroom house that she and her husband, a radio engineer, bought in Santa Clarita last year.

Many of her neighbors in the hillside California Knolls tract built by the Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. agree that such new floor plans match contemporary lifestyles well. If anything, the smaller living room has become an occasional refuge from the television, in the way a study used to be, Chandler said: “My husband likes to read the newspaper in the living room in peace and quiet, with no TV.”

The influential “Vision 94” survey of new home buyers in California contained a much-quoted statistic. Asked which rooms they would be most willing to eliminate or shrink to get more space, consumers targeted the living room first, followed by the dining room. People voted for more space in the family rooms and in the master bedroom, which also is seen as a quiet retreat space for adults.

“As the pace of life has increased and there has been a breakdown of order in the urban environment, people have reinforced this kind of nostalgia for family. That is manifested in a room named the family room and in the idea that if you have a great entertainment room, then the kids would stay home, invite their friends over, rather than going to a club or a bar,” said Clifford Edward Clark, a history professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., and author of a 1986 seminal study, “The American Family Home, 1800 to 1960.”

However, there is an irony inherent in these designs, according to Clark.

“There’s a nostalgia for a kind of image of a nurturing family environment, when in fact the television does not necessarily bring people together or create internal family ties,” he said.

A more positive view was offered by Michael L. Woodley, senior vice president for architecture at Kaufman & Broad, which builds many California tracts for middle-income households.

Although families have less time to be together nowadays, they want that time to be shared in a common space, Woodley said.

“We don’t want to be insulated in small, isolated places, with someone preparing a meal, someone doing homework, someone watching TV. In a family room, all of those things can happen.”

In fact, some designers suggest that the single big room for cooking, eating and entertaining revives a much earlier style of American house: the cabin and the settler farmhouse. To complete the symbolism, fireplaces are disappearing from most new living rooms and retreating to family rooms. In many designs, fireplaces are tucked next to or underneath a wall nook that can fit a 35-inch television.

The architectural change is also attributed to the rough housing market. The construction industry has dropped its take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward design and pays close attention to marketing surveys and focus groups. Small lots and high prices have made buyers much more conscious of usable space, particularly because Southern California houses no longer guarantee quick turnover and big profits. People seem to be buying new homes more for comfort than for speculation.

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The median size of new homes in California grew astonishingly during the boom-time 1980s, from about 1,450 square feet in 1983 to a peak of 1,900 square feet in 1991, statistics show. Median prices of new single-family houses in California rose about 68%, to $187,500, in the past decade. Recently, recession has shrunk the median square footage slightly and further downsizing may be ahead to reduce costs. So, the living room may remain the victim.

But the emphasis on the large family room can be unsettling at first to buyers who are accustomed to more traditional layouts and household habits.

Darren Slotsve bought a new Kaufman & Broad house in the California Bluffs development in Santa Clarita last year. The design of his two-story home reverses the older pattern of having the biggest and most important public space in the front.

“When I first saw it, that’s what I noticed right away, the smaller living room,” said Slotsve, a federal employee. “At first it was kind of weird to me and it felt really different from the house I grew up in.”

Now, he and his wife, Mia, who are in their 20s and expecting their first child, find that they rarely use the living room other than for holidays.

“I would say we don’t need it, but it’s kind of nice to have for formal entertaining,” he said. “If it wasn’t there, we’d just use the family room instead, which is where we are 90% of the time.”

While he was house shopping several months ago, Ken Harte noticed all the built-in television nooks, a prominent feature that older houses usually lack. “Before, it was ‘to each his own’ if you wanted to have a TV. Now it seems it’s expected that the TV should go here and be a certain size too,” said Harte, a purchasing agent for a chemical firm who also bought a home in Santa Clarita.

Some designers and marketers consider living rooms social tailbones, relics that we can’t quite shed in the evolution of the American home. So they are reducing living rooms to what are really lobbies, or parlors, to use a term being revived by some builders.

“There’s a good chance that the living room may be eliminated by the end of the century or even more drastically cut in size,” said Gopal Ahluwalia, research director for the National Assn. of Home Builders, based in Washington. One reason to keep it, he said, is that many home buyers believe that their resale chances might be harmed without at least a token living room.

Living rooms were once the showplace of American life, even if they were wrapped in plastic fabric covers and entered only on Sundays.

“That was the trophy room,” said Artimus Keiffer, a geography professor at Kent State University in Ohio who writes about how people use space in their houses. “Today our status symbols are the size of our houses, our cars, or are displayed by the tag we wear on our clothes. We’ve shifted from displaying trophies to being a walking trophy bearer, even down to our tennis shoes.”

The most important rooms in classic Victorian houses were for visitors--the formal front parlors and dining rooms. But around the turn of the century, according to historians, Americans began to shift from rigid decorum to a relaxed style of child-raising. The new so-called living room was where the generations and sexes were supposed to mix in conviviality. Of course, many living rooms came to have TVs, but the sets tended to be treated like another piece of furniture, a la a 1960 Sylvania console, not as a screen around which the room would be designed.

During the baby boom of the 1950s, the concept of a family room developed--a utilitarian spot in the basement or off the patio where the new television was placed and where the children could play without damaging good furniture. Now, reversing Victorian values, the room that caters to children has become the most important space.

Although many families say they adore the new floor plans as offering better supervision of youngsters, some critics complain that privacy and tranquillity are being lost. The living room’s mystique as the only adult space has often been transferred to the glamorous master bedroom suites that became commonplace in the 1980s. That trend continues as some parents discover that the open layout of the kitchen-entertainment zone leaves them no other comfortable escape from MTV or the 22nd replay of “The Little Mermaid.”

A tour of new developments might leave one wondering whether Hugh Hefner decorated all the master suites in Southern California model homes, placing buckets of champagne bottles at tub-sides and bedsides in the otherwise G-rated environs of suburbia.

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Deep bathtubs, separate showers, toilets behind private doors and walk-in closets as big as some San Francisco hotel rooms are standard many times. That shows how middle-class expectations have escalated since the post-World War II tracts of two-bedroom, one-bath boxes. Other features that had been only for the wealthy have become common: double-height ceilings, three-car garages, appliance-packed kitchens, separate bedrooms for every child, home offices and computerized ventilation systems.

The demand for bathrooms in the master suites is reflected in the steep rise in the number of bathrooms in new houses, builders say. Only 15% of new homes had two or more bathrooms in 1971; by last year, that had grown to 49%. Meanwhile, the average number of people in each household declined from 3.14 in the 1970 U.S. census to 2.63 people in 1993 even as house sizes ballooned.

“When you look up at the makeup of families today, most have dual household incomes. And after working a full schedule and having to solve the children’s problems, they want a larger master retreat to escape to,” said John Schleimer, of Market Perspectives Inc., a housing consulting firm based in the Sacramento area. “They want some downtime and that downtime is in that master bedroom.”

The fact that house designs reflect societal changes is nothing new, said Newport Beach architect Leslie Persohn. For example, some of his work reflects another emerging trend: the inclusion of a downstairs bedroom suite for the aging parents of baby boomers.

“Any type of architecture is the timeline of history in many respects,” Persohn said. “You can go back and look at buildings and find out about the quality of life, the social, cultural and economic implications. It’s a direct statement of the day.”

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Then and Now

The tract house has changed over 40 years, reflecting shifts in cultural values. Formal rooms for visitors have been overshadowed by large family rooms, with the big-screen TV seen as the new American hearth. Bigger master bedrooms are also popular, giving parents a refuge from stay-at-home children. The 1950s * Two small bedrooms, one bath in total size of under 1,100 sq. ft. on one floor * Formal living room, the largest space in the house and site of a fireplace * Small family or TV room, often tucked away in basements or behind garage * Average-size master bedroom with small closets, often without bath * Boxy utilitarian design * Modest kitchen tucked away from other living areas. * Carports or detached one-car garage The 1990s * Three or four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, total size of 2,000 sq. ft. on two floors * Less emphasis on formal living room/dining room * Vastly expanded family room with entertainment center and fireplace * Large master bedroom suite with private bathroom and walk-in closets * Emphasis on vaulted ceilings and dramatic double-height windows * Appliance-packed kitchen that are open to family room * Two- or three-car garages attached to front of house Sources: “The American Family Home, 1800-1960,” by Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., University of North Carolina Press, 1986; Shea Homes; and Kaufman and Broad Home Corp. National Assoc. of Home Builders.