Richard and I visited show homes of this year’s Utah Valley Parade of Homes Friday and Saturday afternoon / evening. We saw all but four of the homes in Northwest Utah County.
REVELATIONS ON THE ROAD
One of the most startling experiences of the Parade of Homes had nothing to do with the home show: the experience of driving through the agricultural areas of South Utah County and through a beautiful peach orchard between Payson and Elk Ridge. It serves as a reminder of how little agricultural lands remain in this county.
Another startling realization I got after two days of traveling about Utah County involves landscape. Utah County has far too much land invested in lawn. We should not be wasting millions of gallons of water on a plant that does not have sex, that does not mature, that we do not eat. We should not be wasting that much water on such a plant in the desert west.
POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS
I find some home design developments hopeful for the future of modern homes.
Of the 21 showhomes, 7 contained 2000 - 3000 square feet, 3 contained 3000 to 4000 square feet. I find the modest size of these homes a major step in the right direction. 5 contained 4000 plus square feet. President Warner’s home contains three floors and 5400 square feet. 2 other homes contained 5000 - 6000 square feet. Only 2 houses contained more than 10,000 square feet. I will state without equivocation for the record that is a step in the right direction.
For starters the homes have lots of insulation, insulated windows, and energy-wise appliances.
Unfortunately, the jack and jill bathroom with two doors to two different bedrooms have seemed to lose popularity.
This year’s show featured two homes created by the Rural Housing Development Corporation. This organization emphasizes homes in the small communities. Both had less than 3000 square feet and modest sized rooms.
My favorite modest home, located in northwest Orem at 1490 North, was a right cute bungalow with a two-car garage toward the back and a front porch along the entire south facade. The main floor contained an open upstairs with a combination parlor, dining area and kitchen, a master bedroom suite, a bedroom and bathroom, and minimal hall space. Downstairs had three bedrooms, bathroom, minimal hall space and living room. The back of the house contained an air lock with doors to the main level, the garage and the outside.
Two town home developments featured garages in the back of the house lining an alleyway. More homes have lovely deep porches and patios. Unfortunately garages still get bigger, not smaller, and mostly they take up space that could go to either porches or gardens.
This year’s parade featured two duplexes with small yards. I believe modern homes should have less front yard to plant into lawn but enough space in the back to plant in garden.
Three homes contained not only theaters but stages for live presentations by kids and grandkids.
Jan Joyce did beautiful work decorating the walls of Villa le Bigne, in a large development of three story townhouses done after the Tuscan design. Tuscan remains a popular design cliche in Utah County: never mind that this is the desert southwest with its own architectural traditions.
This year, we found a lot of wood flooring in the show homes.
WILL ARCHITECTS EVER LEARN? MAYBE NOT.
This year we found a few kitchens that architects designed for cooking food instead of impressing guests. Unfortunately, too many architects still design kitchens that are backwards to the work flow from refrigerator to dining room. It should be obvious to architects that the refrigerator should lead to the sink then to a preparation counter, then to the range, then to the plating and serving counter, then to the dining room table. Few architects seem to under that basic principle.
Speaking of kitchens, the downstairs kitchen is still a popular feature in big houses.
Many show homes featured exercise rooms. This should help curtail the widening American waistline. Unfortunately, too many of these show homes featured big open kitchens designed not as work spaces but as living spaces and featured pantries. The trouble with having a pantry in an open kitchen is that one has to fill it with stuff and then eat it.
When I put a home theater in my home’s addition back in 1992, my friends thought it was utterly revolutionary. This year, most homes have theaters; it seems to be almost a standard feature nowadays. Most have equipment packages way WAY overpriced and oversized for the space.
Architects still, in the main, do not know how to design a bathroom arranged to get the maximum number of people in to do their various businesses and then out ready for the day’s activities. Several bathrooms have toilet rooms too tight for fat people to occupy. It is obvious from the lack of home urinals and bidets that most architects do not understand that boys have different plumbing needs than girls. One architect designed a bathroom with the toilet on the same wall as the door. This means that if one walks in accidentally on a boy, one will get a full frontal view of that boy.
REMODELING THE PAST TO IMPRESS THE PRESENT
The real estate collapse gave the directors of the Utah Valley Parade of Homes a Road to Damascus experience. Before the crisis, the Parade displayed new homes only, and usually big new homes. This year’s show featured three homes remodeled instead of built from scratch.
One home at 460 East Provo contained 5500 square feet. The remodel included a new dining room, kitchen, and big sunny laundry room / craft room. Its major addition featured upstairs the most space wasting amateur connection between original upstairs hall and new addition upstairs hall. It also featured some obnoxious color combinations and a pergola terrace that Richard noted had all drawbacks – too much sun on good days and not enough shade, too little protection from rain on stormy days.
The next remodeled show home, located on 500 South in southeast Orem, I visited twice – once by myself on Friday 11 and again with Richard on Friday 19. Actually, I visited it three times total: BMA Construction built it as a showhome for the 2005 Parade of Homes. When I visited it on 11 June, I thought that I had seen it before. I remembered its location surrounded by big gardens, orchards and a pasture. I remember its main floor east wing music room / musical instrument display room. I remembered the Upstairs bedroom suites, one for girls and one for boys – with a loft play area and a tree mural. The big new feature of this home was its completed basement that featured a big exercise room instead of a big theater. One bedroom featured a private bathroom with a half-frosted window, overlooking the family room. (?!?) That window fit in the wall above the toilet, so the whole arrangement seemed somewhat voyeuristic to me.
REMODELING THE PAST BUT IS THIS THE FUTURE?
On Carterville Road stood the most starkly memorable remodeled house. The thing started as a 1960s long-low California ranch home that the designer / owner had acquired as an abandoned property. The rebuilt house had an interior fashioned after warehouses and factories – exposed wiring conduits, exposed ducts, cement countertop surfaces, industrial toilets, porcelain bulb holders with bare light bulbs illuminating bedrooms, a dining room chandelier that looked as if it might consist of those halogen arms used to light surgery slabs. The master bed and tables were in fact three slabs of concrete.
The staircase fit into a glass box and glass ceiling on the east side of the home. This means it might help heat the place in winter, but in summer it could be insufferable.
The house had a slide from the main floor bedroom hallway to the playroom in the basement.
The basement featured a family room with a cave grotto made of black Styrofoam. Many rooms had porcelain bulb holders and one bare bulb. A storage room near the back yard swimming pool had recessed spotlights. Go figure.
NO HOUSE IS A COMPLETE FAILURE. WE CAN HOLD IT UP AS A BAD EXAMPLE.
This year’s Parade featured a 15,000 square foot monstrosity that contained all the excesses of the Parade of Homes before the real estate crash. Matt McEwan has apparently learned nothing in the real estate crisis. He built the thing on Normandy Way in Highland in a development given over to French architectural pretensions. The mansion looked like an ancient French country house but bore the name of “Perthshire Manor,” which has all the Frenchness of Yorkshire Pudding.
When one invests millions of dollars into a house that features six garages, that means one has to fill the garages with six cars. When one invests in an indoor pool, one has to swim at least five days a week to justify the investment. When one invests in a weight room, one should spend at least five days a week lifting weights to get value for money. When one has a theater, one feels obligated to have people in to watch movies at least once a month at least. When one invests in a billiard room, one has to play billiards at least three times a week — if not more.
This house had a wood-burning pizza oven. This is the first wood-burning appliance in the Parade for ages. The difference between the Italian peasant women baking in those wood burning beehive ovens in the backyard and the modern suburban housewife installing a wood burning pizza oven in her basement kitchen is that the Italian peasant women used those ovens seriously and not to impress people.
The master suite defined pretentious in this show. It had two doors, and suits of armor stood on either side of the main door. I do not find the symbolism of suits of armor as fitting a master bedroom. Nothing quite as romantic as armor – in a kinky sort of way. The doors provided one entrance and one exit. The tub resembled a roman temple; the bathroom featured two toilets in separate rooms, the shower had both an entrance and an exit into the master closet.
A MEMORABLE TRIUMPH
In stark contrast to this monstrosity in Highland was another large home in Elk Ridge. I have seen many mansions in the Parade of Homes over the years, but this one I will remember as one of the best designed, ever.
It sat on 3 and a half acres of rolling foothills surrounding by small neighborhoods and agriculture. It contained three floors and a little over 10000 square feet. From the looks of the photos in the house, it will house a big extended family.
with a huge basketball court in the basement
a movie theater, downstairs kitchen, game rooms, exercise room, and live entertainment stage.
A beautiful home office with a door off the front porch on the main floor, which also featured a family room, a gathering room, a huge gorgeous well-designed logically-arranged kitchen, a beautiful, sunny, big laundry room with big windows and generous counter space. The northeast corner of the house featured an eight-sided gazebo patio terrace with gorgeous views of the mountains in all direction and Utah Valley to the north. The southwest corner of the main floor is a separate apartment with great room, kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom.
The upstairs had five bedrooms and three bathrooms and all the rooms were in the shape of rectangles or squares.
DECOR
Among the more memorable decorating triumphs at this year’s Parade of Homes:
Very few homes had really neon colored paint jobs in any of the rooms. Only one room stands out this year as exhibiting the decorator’s truly bad taste – a bedroom with brown walls and a big accent wall of neon teal. Be still my lunch.
The downstairs kitchen in the Elk Ridge mansion sat to the right of the home theater featured a decor resembling a 1950s malt shoppe.
A show home at 475 South Orem just off the eighth hole of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Course featured golf decor touches throughout the place. Actually, I do not think I would want a home close to a golf course. Golf balls could come raining down on the yard at irregular intervals and the bad language of unhappy golfers would waft over the children and women of the household.
Thank heaven the shows homes contained less of stenciling profound phrases on walls. The last thing I want is a house that lectures me on how I should live and thinking.
a boy’s bedroom decorated with Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, including the famous one with Calvin resorting to peeing out a bed room window because he has monsters under the bed. “The plants don’t seem to grow very well on this side of the house,” Father observes.
A Chinese bedroom and a two-story den decorated a 18th century ship cabin in that French chateau
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