Homes With a Bit of the Homeland

Three years ago, Centex Homes sales representatives who were marketing Grand Manor townhouses in the Lansdowne community in Loudoun noticed that Asian buyers avoided purchasing a model in which the stairs leading up from the foyer lined up exactly with the front door. They learned that such an alignment is bad feng shui. It portends that luck will run out of the home.

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"It raised our awareness," said Char Kurihara, vice president of sales in Virginia for the Dallas-based builder. Now, they've largely abandoned the traditional center-hall, colonial floor plan in this region, a style ubiquitous in the outer suburbs, Centex officials said. They've also done more demographic research.

They learned that about 50 percent of likely buyers for their New Bristow Village community in Prince William County would be Latino families and other foreign-born residents, so they introduced a model with a den that could be converted into a bedroom for grandparents and a connected living and dining room that would give more space for large family parties.

Home builders in the South and West have begun building homes with more and smaller bedrooms than the traditional four-bedroom house, also to appeal to some immigrant families in which many generations live under one roof.

However, the trend parallels the specter of illegal boarding houses -- large homes built with many small bedrooms that are then rented out, sometimes by an absentee landlord -- which has sparked controversy in Fairfax and Prince William counties. One Latino homeowner in the Falls Church area recently backed off plans to build a 13-bedroom, 13-bath home after neighborhood outcry.

But Fairfax Board of Supervisors member Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason) said many of the illegal boarding houses shut down by the county's code enforcement strike team are older ramblers.

"Just because someone builds a McMansion doesn't mean it's going to be a boarding house," Gross said.

Hindu priests at the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Lanham and the Rajdhani Mandir Temple in Chantilly have been advising a steady stream of immigrants from India, many of whom came to the region for the high-tech jobs at companies in the Dulles corridor, who want to buy or build their houses around the principles of vastu shastra. The calls have increased in the past two years because prospective home buyers now have many homes to choose from and can pick those designed closest to vastu shastra principles, the priests said.

Vastu shastra is the ancient Indian design philosophy that governs temple-building and is used now to create harmony in living spaces.

It suggests building homes facing east to soak up sunlight, for example, and placing the kitchen in the center as the symbolic heart of the home. Some Indian buyers have eschewed foreclosed homes because vastu shastra teaches that it's best to live in a home with positive energy, where the residents have been happy and prosperous.

Balasubramanian, 46, bought a home in The Retreat at South Village three years ago. The neighborhood appealed to Balasubramanian, a real estate agent, and his wife, Bharathi, because it is a locus for the fast-growing Indian community in Loudoun and western Fairfax. South Riding has an Indian community association that holds events around holidays such as Diwali, the Festival of Lights. The local Giant stocks such staples as dried lentils, yogurt and rice flour.

Several sheets of scratched-up blueprints later, he and his wife had their dream home, a suburban brick colonial built around the principles of vastu shastra. The home has a kitchen with a granite countertop in the center, a lamp-lit prayer room upstairs and a balcony off the master bedroom where tea can be sipped in the mornings.