In spring 2006, 13 employees from Southern Land Company’s architecture department in Franklin, Tenn., flew to Dallas and canvassed neighborhoods including Swiss Avenue, Munger Place and the Park Cities, armed with notebooks and cameras.
Their mission: Find the most charming, most enduring architectural styles and re-create them at Tucker Hill, an 800-acre master-planned community in McKinney. Called the “new old house movement” by Building Systems magazine, new-home construction that borrows the architectural grace and attention to detail of earlier eras is luring prospective homeowners away from McMansion styles to houses that look like the ones their grandparents grew up in.
Heirloom homebuilders are focusing on the turn-of-the-20th-century charm that buyers of new homes are responding to – front porches, period hardware, windows with divided panes – and pairing them with modern amenities like open floor plans and walk-in closets that consumers don’t want to live without.
The change comes because homebuyers are bored with run-of-the-mill design, says Rob Sell of Fort Worth’s Village Homes. They don’t want block after block of the same house in their neighborhoods, and they don’t like excessive details tacked onto architecture without authentic historical context. Today’s buyers know design, and they expect their homes to look the part. Mr. Sell says buyers are more knowledgeable about home styles than ever before.
“There are better books on architecture, and people are starting to appreciate and ask for historical-style architecture,” Mr. Sell says.
And builders, hoping to appeal to well-educated, discriminating buyers, are complying. Historically inspired communities are popping up in states including Massachusetts and Washington, as well as Texas.
Mr. Sell is developer of Idlewild, an 18-home subdivision west of downtown Fort Worth focused on classical architecture. He studied the work of his favorite English architect, Edwin Lutyens, known for incorporating modern touches into classical architectural styles, before undertaking the Italian Renaissance style of the Southern Living 2008 Idea Home. He kept early-20th-century details such as the groin vault ceiling in the dining room but added 21st-century touches like a media room and an open kitchen. That house, along with two others and a vacant lot in the neighborhood, has sold. Two other spec houses are on the market.
“Restraint is a precious commodity,” says Mr. Sell. “The pendulum is swinging back the other way, and good, historically inspired design really does matter.”
In McKinney, Danny Lane, vice president of single-family architecture for Southern Land Company, says tract builders tend to overlook precious details. For example, instead of shutters being placed on house exteriors as trim, they should be attached with hinges, should match the size of the windows and should have hold-back hardware fixed at the bottom.
Period details add to construction costs, but they are key to avoiding the homogenized look of McMansions, which combine architectural styles willy-nilly, he says, and somehow end up all looking the same. Builders who do their homework on these finer points of historical homes sometimes find that potential buyers mistake their new build for a restored historic structure.
“They’ll ask, ‘Are the floors original to the house?’ And we laugh and say, well yeah, but the house is only three weeks old,” says builder J.W. Brasher.
Mr. Brasher and partner Clark Mitchell own Swiss Avenue Homes, builders of historically inspired new construction. In 2004, they won Preservation Dallas’ award for best new construction in a historic context and fooled even the judges, who thought they had entered the wrong category. They thought the home in Old East Dallas was a remodel, not a new build.
Some say the push to turn back the clock on home design is about recapturing the neighborhoods of our youth, those close-knit communities of yesteryear. But more than that, builders say buyers equate historic architecture with safety and value. In times of economic uncertainty, historic homebuilders are banking that traditional styles will ease the minds of reticent buyers.
According to the North Texas Real Estate Information System and Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center, 2008 single-family home sales prices are down 2 to 3 percent, quite the opposite from Swiss Avenue Homes’ selling prices, which have gone up 52 percent since it put its first house on the market in 2001. Of the five homes Mr. Brasher and Mr. Mitchell have built, 10 weeks is the longest one has remained on the market. Two were bought before they put a for sale sign out front.
Meanwhile at Tucker Hill, the starting price is $350,000, significantly higher than what the Collin County tax office reports as the average McKinney home price at $211,729. There, seven of its homes are sold and 15 more are on the market. The community is expected to eventually hold 2,100 homes, both spec and custom builds.
Why do historically accurate new homes seem to buck the downward price spiral? Jim Cheney, VP of communications for Southern Land Company, believes that solid value comes from solid home design. At Tucker Hill, he says, they avoid trendy features like turrets, those small exterior towers so popular on new homes.
“We stay away from themes and gimmicks,” he says, “and we feel that makes our product more premium.”
Builders of this genre also say the exterior details go beyond architecture – they contribute to building a better neighborhood.
Unlike many postwar houses, there are no true back yards in Tucker Hill. Southern Land, like conservationists around the country, believes that smaller yards tend to mean more community involvement. Instead of large yards there are parks, green spaces and even a traditional town square where residents can gather and children can play.
And although Swiss Avenue Homes builds infill housing in old neighborhoods, not in master-planned new subdivisions, its front porches are designed to get homeowners outside and chatting with neighbors. Both promote a walkable, bike-friendly lifestyle that mirrors the neighborhoods created at the turn of the 20th century, before streets were inundated with automobiles.
“The old Norman Rockwell picture of life is appealing to people again,” says Mr. Brasher, who builds in Peak’s Suburban Addition Historic District, with a business plan to expand into adjacent historic districts as land becomes available for new construction. “We’re all so busy and rushed, there’s so much technology in our office jobs, when we get home we just want to step back in time, where everything’s a little less hectic and more on a human scale.”
“People really do sit out on their front porches at night and know everyone by name,” adds Mr. Mitchell.
“People have a natural skepticism about new developments that strive to capture traditional designs,” says Mr. Cheney. “They dismiss it as if master-planned communities are somehow shallow and fake in nature. What they are missing is the fact that the beloved old neighborhoods in Dallas, like the Park Cities, were at one time new as well.”
Mr. Sell says homebuyers just want to feel they own a home worthy of preservation in the future.
“Everybody’s building ‘Old World,’ but really it’s the same old North Dallas special with new shutters,” Mr. Sell says. “Impostors trying to look the part just don’t.”
Credits: Dallas News