Two Houses, Two Visions
Creature Comforts vs. 'Adorable' Efficiency At Builders Group's Annual Trade Show

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 21, 2006

Two contrasting images of the American home of the future were on display last week at the glitzy and gargantuan annual home builders' trade show in Orlando, which drew a record 105,000 attendees, including builders, architects, interior designers, building-component salespeople -- and numerous gawking homeowners.

The showplace house that is a hallmark of the National Association of Home Builders show, dubbed the New American Home 2006, was a luxurious, sprawling place in a new suburban community several miles from the convention center. The show house is where housing-products manufacturers display the latest and greatest in home fittings and fixtures. This year was no exception, and the house featured a panoply of plush features: Side-shooting showers, two poolside fireplaces, a barbecue kitchen on the patio, room-size wood-paneled walk-in closets, a massage room, a pet alcove, four staircases, an elevator. It faced inward, like a Spanish hacienda, toward an outdoor but completely private living area overlooking the pool, where invited guests could pleasantly interact with the owners.

A sharply different portrait of the modern American lifestyle was visible outside the convention center, resting on a temporary foundation on a parking lot near the main convention building. It was a small, inexpensive cottage, simple and compact. Its little porch looked out to the street so that residents could sit on benches and interact with passersby.

The two houses spoke to different worlds, as well as different wallets.

At 7,100 square feet, the New American Home is a palatial structure that dwarves many American houses, though not as much as it once would have. Now even the houses of fairly ordinary Americans have grown markedly. In 1950, the average new single-family house was 983 square feet; in 2005, the average new house was 2,349 square feet, even as family sizes have fallen. And 39 percent of all new houses are bigger than 2,400 square feet.

"We're trying to achieve a 'wow' factor everywhere you go in the house," said Orlando-based builder Alex Hannigan, who built the New American Home. The goal in the design is creating a "sense of grandeur," said John Orgren, regional design manager for WCI Communities Inc., the architecture firm that designed it.

Lavish amenities were omnipresent on the trade-show floor, as well, where builders could find an aboveground stone-enclosed spa for $150,000 or a hydrogen-burning fireplace for $49,999.

The little yellow cottage in the parking lot was planned and built as a volunteer effort by architects, planners, home-construction companies and appliance manufacturers, led by noted architect Andres Duany. Devised after Hurricane Katrina, it was intended as a structure that could house impoverished victims of natural disasters more attractively and affordably than many other kinds of manufactured or stick-built housing. It was only 308 square feet, with one bedroom with four bunks, a 30-square-foot bath and a tiny kitchen. But a steady stream of visitors, many of whom asked where they could purchase the house themselves, made it clear that there is a strong market for such a house at a time when soaring prices have made homes unaffordable for moderate-income people in many parts of the country.

"I like to simplify my life and think about what's really necessary," said Jason Spellings of Jackson, Miss., who built the small house. "Everybody coming through wants a house like this. It struck a chord with people, and that's different than the chord an 8,000-square-foot home strikes."

The designers touted the house as a way people who are in distressed circumstances could live modestly but affordably, with hope they could one day expand it a bit, making the house a little larger, as their finances improve. Various design configurations would allow homeowners to add a room or two, raising the size to perhaps 800 square feet, or to convert the place into an in-law suite or guest cottage. It is designed to be a permanent house, not a temporary mobile home of the kind used to house people cheaply for short periods of time. Instead of wood, it is sheathed in Hardiplank fiber-cement siding, made by James Hardie Building Products Inc. Hardie's latest version of the siding offers a pre-finished surface that is guaranteed not to require repainting for 15 years.

"It's an adorable little house that everyone wanted to hug," said Marianne Casuto, the house's designer. She has designed it in a way that will allow the plan to be adapted to the local architectural styles in various regions. The pitched roof, outward-facing porch and bright yellow color were meant to be compatible with traditional Mississippi Gulf Coast architectural styles but could be adapted to local styles elsewhere. Casuto hopes builders will use the model, whose plans will be available soon, to re-create houses that fit into the local landscape rather than duplicate the bland neutrality of many suburbs.

The differences between the two houses were stark. The price of the upscale house? An estimated $5.3 million. Estimated price of the little cottage? About $25,000 to $35,000 for the structure alone, excluding foundation and land.

Then there was the media component.

The New American Home featured 11 televisions so that people could watch while they bathe, cook or do laundry.

The Katrina cottage, on the other hand, had no built-in televisions. Instead, it's a bring-your-own-set kind of thing, if you have one.

On the trade-show floor, television screens were abundant. Whirlpool even displayed a prototype microwave with a TV screen on the front of the door, so that consumers need not miss a single precious moment of their favorite shows as they zap their fast-cooking meals.

Big-screen viewing, meanwhile, has gone from a luxury to a necessity for some homeowners. Several builders from South Carolina, for example, said buyers there want these high-tech amenities more than before, even if they have to pay for them with borrowed money on credit cards or with 100 percent mortgage financing.

"If you build a house without a home theater system -- prewired with speakers -- it won't sell," said builder Kent Miller of Spartanburg.

Conflicting visions of American life were apparent at the show in other ways, as well. For example, with energy prices rising, products that save consumers money on electricity or heating bills drew much attention. David Rodgers, program manager for the Building Technologies Program at the U.S. Department of Energy, who attended the show to talk about government efforts to boost energy efficiency, said calls by builders to his office have tripled since last year, with a particularly sharp spike in requests for information that started in the fall.

"One of the key audiences we are reaching out to are builders," Rodgers said.

And the New American Home is the first National Association of Home Builders showcase house to be a certified green home, meaning it meets certain standards of environmental friendliness. Among the energy-saving features are double-paned glass doors with special glazing on the glass to reduce solar heat in the summer and weatherstripping to keep cold air inside in the summer and outside in the winter.

But even as they seek ways to save energy, Americans are looking at new ways to expend it, as well. Even at a time of growing awareness of the high cost of energy, consumers are looking to buy more and more products that consume electricity in new ways. Instead of having just one refrigerator, for example, people could purchase a set of refrigerators or a set of freezers, from a new product line by Thermador. The company calls these movable cooling devices refrigeration columns, and they can be placed at various locations around a home rather than just in the kitchen. Instead of a single icebox, Thermador customers can buy two or three or four, at prices ranging from $2,699 to $6,699 per unit.

Home elevators are another kind of electrical device more people are seeking to buy. Rather than move to single-level houses, as senior citizens have done in the past, aging baby boomers with bad knees or older homeowners with disabilities increasingly want to remain in their own multi-level houses, even though they may have been built with younger and more agile residents in mind. Many builders today are placing elevators in new houses or leaving an adaptable space, such as an extra-large closet, that can be converted into a shaft for a future elevator.

At Waupaca Elevator Co., a Wisconsin-based manufacturer, home elevator sales rose 20 percent in 2005, on top of a 20 percent rise in 2004, said Stacie Sorenson, the firm's marketing director. Some people are buying them for need and some for convenience, she said. She said they cost in the $20,000s, or about the same price as a mid-size car.

Sales keep "jumping and jumping and jumping," Sorenson said. "Home elevators are becoming like the automatic garage-door openers of the 1970s. Everyone could lift the door, but it is so much easier to sit in the car."

So it all goes back to the core question: Is less more, or is more, well, more?