Reader Putnam Lake posted a link to a very good article in Slate on a subject that’s certainly relevant to Greenwich. Here are some excerpts:
They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.
Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.
….
As I’ve visited other cities in recent years, I’ve noticed that Arlington is far from alone. This style is becoming the dominant mode in well-off neighborhoods everywhere, from Atlanta to Nashville to Austin to Boulder. If you drive through the Arlington of wherever you live, you’ll surely see Giant White Houses sprouting on every cleared lot. As one went up next door, I wondered: Why are the houses so giant? Why are the houses so white? Why are the houses like this now?
After speaking to realtors, architects, critics, and the guy who built the house next door, I’ve learned that the answer is more complicated than I’d imagined. It has to do with Chip and Joanna Gaines, Zillow, the housing crunch, the slim margins of the spec-home industry, and the evolution of minimalism. It has to do, most of all, with what a certain class of homebuyer even believes a house to be—whether they realize it or not.
1. Why So Giant?
….. To construct a house like this in Arlington these days, McMullin said, you’ve got to spend over $1 million. Once realtors take their commissions, county fees get paid, and all the other ancillary costs are factored in, the developer’s profit was more modest than I expected. “All in, just on a cash basis, these projects are making anywhere from 8 to 15 percent,” he said. “Heck, you could take that money and just buy a bond. Land costs are so high, construction costs, the administrative burden—that all just increases every year.” The result: If a developer doesn’t absolutely maximize the square footage of the house he builds in this market, he might not make any money at all.
The Giant White House, though, is not only giant in its floorplan—it’s giant vertically. It’s a trend that comes not from the suburbs but from the city. In recent decades, the loft—the converted warehouse, with its open spaces and high industrial ceilings—became popular in American cities, said Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago. “Those kinds of preferences trickled out to homeowners, and now everyone wants a cathedral-like ceiling.”
Twenty-first-century builds are framed in the same way that houses have been framed for 100-plus years, Preissner said. But just as the popularization of the nail gun—patented by a couple of World War II vets who adapted machine-gun technology for construction use—made building those wood frames easier, modern technological developments like glulam lumber and stronger steel make it cheap and easy to build everything just a little bit bigger. “Drywall comes in 8-foot-by-4-foot sheets,” Preissner said, an explanation for the typical 8-foot ceiling in a midcentury house like ours. “But now they just cut drywall to custom size.” The GWH next to us features 10-foot ceilings on the first floor, and 9-foot ceilings upstairs and in the basement.
The result? The house next door towers over ours. Through my dining room windows, I’m staring at the GWH’s above-grade basement. Through the windows of the GWH’s dining room, our roof serves as a kind of horizon line. From the second floor, you’re looking down on the neighborhood through the upper branches of the lot’s few remaining trees.
Preissner told me that this kind of total disconnection from one’s neighbors is not a bug but a feature of this kind of house. “People want their second floor much higher up, to be removed from the street, for more privacy,” he said. He compared this “escalating preference” to cars getting bigger and bigger, because it makes drivers feel insecure to be at the wheel of a sedan when everyone else has SUVs. People buying GWHs, Preissner said, “want to be higher up so they’re not looked down upon.”
2. Why White?
Many of the design choices on GWHs—the white color scheme, the vertical board-and-batten siding, the tin roof—can be traced to the modern farmhouse trend and, basically, to Chip and Joanna Gaines, whose Fixer Upper TV show popularized the style among wealthy homeowners a decade ago. “HGTV, the Gaineses down in Texas—all these people heavily influence the market that we’re dealing with,” said James McMullin, the Northern Virginia contractor. “Maybe a different market is influenced by the New Yorker or something.”
But the current GWH has moved just slightly beyond a pure modern farmhouse—its style is more complicated, and ever-evolving. The whiteness of the home doesn’t only speak to the traditional white-painted rural farmhouse; it speaks to minimalism, a style that has crept from the elite into the vernacular over recent years. “The real social language of this color is cleanliness,” Preissner pointed out, and the house’s lines—the sharp distinctions between white and black—give off an air of crisp, purposeful clarity. Wagner said, “It started out as a kind of farmhouse look, and now it’s a weird hodgepodge of minimalist things that are borrowed from farmhouse style, but pared down.”
That these structures—which are, when you think about it, about as maximalist as houses can be—should cop aspects of minimalist design is aesthetically confusing, but it’s not culturally confusing. “Minimalism is a signifier of class,” Wagner said. “In the 2010s, minimalism was CEOs, and people who had architect-designed houses, and Apple. It implies sophistication.” These days, Wagner sees a lot of what she calls “normie minimalism” in home design.
Are we stuck forever with the white house? Eli Tucker, a D.C.-area real estate agent, said that he’s seeing interiors—which once featured nothing but shiplap and hardwood—get a touch more homey and retro: “You might hang wallpaper in, say, the powder room,” he mused.
For exteriors, though, “White is the formula, until the market says it’s not.”
McMullin agreed. “Our whites are not as bright anymore,” he said. “You may not detect that.” (I do not.) “We have tried to bring in more earth tones, on a marginal basis. We’re seeing a return of brick and stone accents. But all that said, every time we vary too far from that formula of white and black …” He’d seen other developers take big aesthetic risks—an Eichler-style midcentury modern in a neighborhood full of bigger houses, for example—and watched as those properties sat on the market for months.
“Everybody’s scared to make a mistake,” said Tucker. When each new build is a seven-figure risk, “Nobody wants to be the idiot who built the wrong thing and nobody likes it.”
3. Why do these houses look the way they do?
The left side of this GWH has a pitched roof and vertical siding; the middle is an entryway and porch set atop red brick stairs; the right side is a squared-off box, calling to mind the cheap, rectilinear 5-over-2 apartment construction filling city blocks. “When I was a kid,” Preissner said, “we used to have these flipbooks split into three parts. You could put Boba Fett’s head on C3PO’s waist, with R2-D2’s legs, and then flip them around. For a builder doing architecture for residential clients, that’s just what happens.”
Jon DeHart, who sold the house, said the same thing, though he was far more upbeat.
“The trend right now is a blend,” he said. “Farmhouse is still in, and there’s a strong contingent of people who love modern, and love contemporary. So by building a house that at least has the appearance of all those, it speaks to all those interests.” When he saw the house’s design, he said, he found it “very sellable.”
