Say hello to an old friend

AS workers put the finishing touches on her just-minted home amid a tangle of electrical cords and ladders, Pam McGregor ticks off her plans, not for the inside, but the outside of her house -- her front porch. “We’re going to pull the travertine out here, put a rocker there, a love seat and some rattan chairs,” the mother of four shouts over the roar of power tools.

The appointments are no afterthought for McGregor, who chose the Woodbury development in Irvine for its focus on neighborhood, something she believes this open-air space will promote.

“When you pull your living room outside, it encourages people to get out more,” she says. “Parents can sit out and watch their kids, say hello to neighbors.”

After largely disappearing in the 1950s, the front porch is staging the inklings of a comeback, thanks to homeowners like McGregor. The number of new houses with porches is up 11% over the last decade, according to the National Assn. of Homebuilders, and porches figure prominently in Southern California developments such as Columbus Grove and Columbus Square in Irvine and Tustin. In Orange, the city planning committee has mandated porches for a project of Craftsman-style homes.

Why the trend, especially here in Southern California, where residential architecture has historically focused on the private realm of the backyard? In a word, isolation. And a growing desire to avoid it.

Transient careerists are in the mood for a home, not a house -- a community that can provide personal connections and a sense of belonging. Baby boomers remember suburban blocks bustling with kids playing ball and neighbors sharing burgers; Generation X and Y home buyers hark back through movies and TV to vintage neighborhoods where everyone knew your name.

Merely building a porch, however, doesn’t mean shared lemonades and Parcheesi will come along with it. Architects face the challenge of melding a traditional design element with the modern realities of wider streets, smaller lots and concerns about privacy. Some porches end up as cosmetic window dressing.

“Many porches that you see in the recent homes have been token,” says David Ko, a residential designer with Santa Ana-based Angeleno Associates, which is calling for full-size porches for the home of Angels baseball star Garret Anderson. Some modern versions of the porch don’t even have enough space for a person to sit, Ko says.

There’s also ambivalence about how social neighbors want to be.

Homeowners “want to know their neighbors, but not that well,” says James Chung, president of Reach Advisors, a Boston-based research company that tracks buyer attitudes. “Not all home buyers want the front of their home so close to noise or the density required to make the front porch interaction work.”

The porch may be outdoors, but it’s still private space, what psychologists call primary territory. A porch has to enable contact between residents and passersby without a bullhorn, but it can’t be too close to the action and it can’t be too low. Sit on a porch that’s at sidewalk level with pedestrians looking down at you, and they begin to feel invasive.

“The important thing is elevation change -- it should be two, three, four steps up,” says Will Haynes, an architect at William Hezmalhalch Architects who has designed homes with porches, including some in the new Irvine developments. When a porch sits high enough off the ground, it puts you at “eye level with people walking by, which gives you a sense of security and privacy.”

IT wasn’t a burning need to hobnob that triggered the initial porch wave back in the 19th century but something more urgent: wilting heat.

In the pre-air-conditioning era, stir-fried homeowners in the Southeast fled to their outdoor sanctuaries for relief from oppressive summer broilings. A well-designed porch was essential not just as an escape hatch but also as a natural AC device, pulling cooler air into the home through cross-ventilation.

The American porch sprouted from French and Spanish influences, notably the veranda, a deck that extended the full width of the home. Craftsman housing kits from the Sears Roebuck catalog spread the ultimate front room coast to coast. Along the way it became less a haven from heat and more of an architectural and social statement. Woodwork flourishes -- ornamented brackets on posts, embellished rails and the like -- put a face on the home.

“When you look at a Victorian house and its porch, it’s a highly articulated, elaborate piece of the architectural facade,” says Dana Cuff, professor of architecture at UCLA. “It’s like your Sunday hat, the showiest part.”

That finery remains on display in historic homes around Southern California. In Orange’s Old Towne, more than 1,000 historic Craftsman bungalows sport vintage porches. Just off the beach in Santa Monica, a fantabulous 1907 Victorian, complete with Queen Anne turret, shows off the classic regalia -- sculpted columns, ornamental railings, a wide staircase, and enough space for a small orchestra. The room is appointed with Tiffany lamps and antique wicker furniture, including a mammoth swing.

The home’s owner, Penny Fisk, says the room has dramatically upgraded social life from her last address, in Beverly Hills.

“If you’re sitting out here, the neighbors will come up and talk to you,” says Fisk, who has dinner out front in the summer. “I really wouldn’t have nearly as much contact with my neighbors without it.”

DURING its heyday from the 1890s to the 1930s, the porch served as a curator of life passages, as families dined, uncles taught checkers, neighbors gossiped, and boys courting young ladies tried out the smoothest lines they could get away with under parental supervision. But cars changed everything.

To make room for transit and parking, wider streets pushed houses farther from the sidewalk and interaction. The garage was attached to the house and replaced porches as the dominant street-facing feature. Foundations also shifted from the elevated slab of porch fare to simpler construction on level ground.

But what really drove the demise of the porch in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Ko says, was the invention of the family room, which moved the social action to the rear of the house and directed activity to the backyard.

“When they had porches, people had no backyard,” he says. “The backyard was used for utility. All the formal spaces faced the front. When the family room came, the formal room of interaction went to the back. What is left is the kitchen and bathroom toward the front, and the porches no longer made sense.”

These days, as buyers crave more traditional neighborhoods, the welcome mat of the porch is making more sense. A study published earlier this year in American Sociological Review found Americans growing increasingly isolated. Since 1985, the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has nearly tripled, with the largest loss of support in networks of non-kin, such as neighbors.

The yearning for classic neighborhoods has triggered retro planned communities such as Woodbury, which aims to recapture the feel of small-town U.S.A. Its eclectic architecture -- cottage, Tuscan, Italian, French, Spanish and Santa Barbara styles -- brings back such vintage flourishes as stone exteriors, arched nooks, stovepipe chimneys and porches. Some porches form wrap-around covered corridors, while others spill onto larger outdoor hangouts, courtyards.

Pam Vaughn, a finance executive for a software engineering firm, spends as much time as she can outside a French-style town house. “I come out in the evening and watch people walk by,” she says. “I hardly use any air conditioning anymore.”

Irvine Community Development Co., a division of the Irvine Co., created Woodbury and the nearby sister development Portola Springs. “The notion was to bring people outside,” says President Joe Davis. “People love to wave to their neighbors.”

But it’s not just buyers driving porch interest. With lots smaller these days, an extra room can help make up for skimpier backyards.

“The Irvine Co. has been kind of genius in trying to get more housing per acre, which in California means that it’s going to be slightly more affordable, because it’s land that’s so expensive,” UCLA’s Cuff says. “If you can make the inside extend into the exterior, not only in the back but in the front, that would be a great reason to have a porch.”

Cuff is encouraged by the trend toward community, but she’s skeptical the new porches can fill the old social bill in more than a symbolic way.

“How do you create a community like the porch represented when the streets are dominated by automobiles?” she asks. “The two things don’t go together that well.”

THERE are other barriers, namely time, or the lack of it. With lengthening workdays, commutes and the 24/7 leash of instant communication tools, time-starved homeowners aren’t prime candidates for lingering and the conversational arts of yesteryear. Sitting outdoors has a lot more competition these days, whether it be from big-screen plasmas or the Internet.

Designers also say contemporary porches aren’t big enough to be used regularly.

“Porches used to be integrated into the house design,” architect Haynes says. “There was enough depth to furnish it. You need 6 to 8 feet to furnish a porch properly. The old porches were often 8 to 10 feet wide.”

The decks are spacious on the colonial-style homes in the Gables section of Columbus Grove. The city of Orange has approved classic-sized porches for an upcoming development of Craftsman homes that will play off the town’s historic architecture. And Ko’s firm specializes in full-size porches, including 12-foot-deep versions for the adobe-style home of Angels star Anderson.

“We want a porch where you can actually have a dining table with five or six chairs and really enjoy the outdoors,” Ko says.

He’s even buying a Craftsman bungalow in Orange so he can immerse himself in the indoor-outdoor dynamic as a prelude to the city’s new Craftsman project.

“This is an opportunity for architects and builders to really consider the porch, because this is what makes a home,” Ko says. “A home with curb appeal does not turn its back on the street.”

Joe Robinson can be reached at home@latimes.com.