Houses

Have you ever noticed how interior styles of homes have changed over the decades?  I've been thinking about it ever since we started looking at real estate.  Get a 1910 farmhouse, for instance, and you'll find a lovely, expansive porch to sit on (for when the house was too hot; some porches were even used as summer sleeping quarters), an extremely large kitchen (for all that canning, preserving and cooking Mom would have been doing all day long), and good sized bedrooms for everyone.  But Mom and Dad's bedroom wouldn't necessarily have been much bigger than the kid's rooms, and everyone probably shared just one bathroom.  There were even attics and cellars for storage.  Lovely.

That went along until we hit the late 1940's and 1950's.  That's when people began to move into areas called suburbs, where their houses would have been closer, and therefore smaller, and where those smaller houses were surrounded with good-sized yards.  Windows got smaller to provide more privacy, and porches were smaller (you couldn't really sleep on them anymore on a hot summer night, since your neighbors were so close by) and the houses had a definite community feel. But kitchens were still large, yet seemed smaller because of all the new appliances -- dishwashers, big refrigerators, and all things "modern."

The 60's and 70's hit and women began working in droves, no longer minding the home all day long. The thing about houses built in the 60's and 70's is that the kitchens are really small.   Galley kitchens were not unusual, but if you buy an un-renovated house from this era and you happen to enjoy cooking,  you will find those kitchens hard to move around and work in.  That's because they were designed so that you could come home from work, pop a Stouffer's entree into the microwave, and, voila -- dinner.

Then in the 1990's and aughts, we discovered the "great room," where kitchen, dining and living areas were all opened up and placed together.  Owner's master suites began being built, and were often as large as the Great Room.  Our current home, for instance, has more carpeting in our master suite than our living room, and all that bedroom space for just one bedroom seems somehow wasteful.  Children's bedrooms in these new houses are usually miniscule, sometimes less than 10 ft. by 10 ft.  Kitchen size can vary, with the only downside being that whatever you are cooking, your entire Great Room will smell of it because, well, the kitchen is part of the Great Room.  Great except the days you're serving fish.

Then the Crash of 2008 happened, and now, the latest trend is to build new homes with energy efficient solar panels, solar hot water heaters, enhanced insulation and the like.  They still look like houses from 10 years ago -- big and open -- but they use energy more like the houses from the 1950's. And you can plug your car into the power station in your garage if need be.


I'm thinking a renovated 1910 farmhouse with solar panels would be perfect.  Probably not affordable, but perfect.  I'm ready to ditch our master suite and Great Room for something more traditional, but want a big kitchen as well as 2nd and 3rd bedrooms of a decent size.  That's not asking too much, is it?  Just take me back a century, architecturally speaking, but with all the technological trappings and advantages of 2012.