A white house with black trim.
James Osmond / Getty ImagesThis year we are all freshly bombarded with exploding images of “Homes For Sale.” In case you hadn’t noticed, Connecticut homes are in great demand. The pandemic revealed technologies that have changed the way we use where we live. Home life now means more than having a place to hang your hat. Bedroom communities are becoming live-work-learn-play communities. Consequently, homes now have more value this year.
In a free market economy, value is the chum in the water for those seeking a profit. The real estate market has exploded in this bubble. Until that bubble bursts, the marketing of homes is unavoidable, no matter how devoted you are to your present home. As with every housing market since World War II, fads, trends and visual sound bites hype every real estate ad.
The list of “house hypes” is long. Today, black windows are crisp, even edgy. “The New Farmhouse” is a home type, like a Center Hall Colonial. “Net Zero” homes may look like any generic home, but they offer both low-cost occupancy and moral superiority. But these screaming clarions of desirability follow in a long tradition of shilling products with hyped visual triggers.
Twenty years ago, Corian countertops with integral sinks were nearly miraculous in their seamlessness. Before that, the pop of seeing “avocado” colored appliances overwhelmed the arctic white of the kitchen appliance world, along with “goldenrod” and “coppertone.” The pool-sized jacuzzi master bathtub was seen as a marital rejuvenation. They may be an endangered species, but “conversation pits” were as present as ash trays in people’s homes, joining jalousie windows on the ash heap of failed innovations.
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Interior design of elegant kitchen with black and white elements.
CreativaStudio / Getty Images
But those gimmicks (along several dozen million Palladian windows in the 1980’s) are now visual soundbites of their eras. Media in the house-selling Hype Machine creates herding trends that relentlessly push the hip cool of the cutting edge on the images on all our screens. The cliches of the past decades eventually all jumped the shark and revealed their cynical trend porn that is used to market product. I think those fads will soon be followed by today’s obsession with black windows.
Why do we need fads to validate one of our most fundamental values: creating our homes? Our vulnerability to this hype machine is due to the terrorizing risk of home ownership. Homes are the largest investment and debt we all face. Dependability in that investment is often necessary or the undeniable liability of the debt we need to own a home overwhelms the joy of home ownership.
Black windows distract us from the huge risk of owning a home. We can float down the river of trend, fad and hype and be washed into acceptance of our extreme risk, distracted by the eye candy of the moment. As an architect I am happy to aid in the effort to build and fulfill my clients’ desires and integrate the popular soundbites of the home hype machine into what we help them create. But as a fellow homeowner, I have to make sure of the real, long term, costs of literally buying into these fads.
I look at homes for those who are considering finding a new place to live. Just as black windows and “smart technology” sells homes, the 1992 all-white kitchen, the bloated great room of the Reagan administration or the 1960’s shag carpeting are seen as cost deductions that are applied to the actual offer given to the seller.
Not everything “new!” is bad. Some things that are trendy become necessities for future generations. Foam insulation, LED lighting, eight-foot-high garage doors, large flush-floored showers or simply an open interior are bona fide values, all generated in the last generation of homeownership. The gist of some features you want in making your place can be found in trends. I have an exquisite 32-year-old Corian sink/countertop vanity in my home, and I love it.
So when homeowners ask for the “flavor of the day” home feature, I show them alternatives because despite the group think of bubbles, Houzz and Real Estate Brokers, what is snappy today can be funky tomorrow. An anonymous broker pulled me aside at a showing last month and confided “I have already had buyers reject the black window thing - it’s already dated.”
What never goes out of fashion is our fondest hopes for our homes and the realities of whatever land and community that we might live in. But the “look” of images that are now offered on millions of screens is just a shorthand to co-opt the hopes of our essential human desire to have our own place.
The basic need to be sheltered is only matched by the giddy empowerment of having a “cool” place. A good designer can see both realities and provide perspective and options. No one wants a home that becomes a landfill of avocado, black and Palladian waste.
Our homes are too important.
Duo Dickinson is a Madison-based architect.