STUCCO: NOT SO SLAPDASH

The late Malvina Reynolds best expressed the modern image of stucco when she sang about “little boxes made of ticky-tacky”.  In the years since World War II, the mention of stucco has usually prompted snickers, its image cheapened by dreary G.I.  housing and monotonous design made infamous by tracts such as Levittown, New York and Daly City, California--the real-life inspiration for Reynolds’s lyrics.

Little boxes made of ticky tacky?

Actually, stucco is much more durable than wood.

But stucco’s history is long and dignified. The ancient Greeks applied it over rough stone to get a smooth surface that could be decorated, and the Romans mixed it with marble chips to obtain a brilliant interior finish.  The magnificent frescoes of the Renaissance were painted onto a form of wet stucco. It’s still the finish of choice in Mediterranean lands.                

Stucco is still unmatched for beauty and versatility.  It’s far more durable and fireproof than wood. It can be formed in limitless ways, and the final or “skim” coat can be colored to almost any shade, and will never fade, peel, or need repainting.  

America’s golden age of stucco began with the California Bungalows of the 1920s.  These squat little homes, which were eventually  built from coast to coast, quickly demonstrated the material’s economy and design potential. Contractors found that, unlike siding and shingles, stucco went up quickly and would conform to any shape.  Better yet, stucco could make a humble house look substantial:  By applying it over a hollow wooden framework, for example, a porch column could be given Herculean proportions.  

Not bad for a stucco house, eh? The famed

Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California,

(designed by architect Julia Morgan and

in 1919) made brilliant use of stucco.

The Mediterranean style homes of the thirties also put stucco to good use for mock adobe walls and arches. Its ability to form compound curves made it perfect for the bulging shapes this style demanded.

After World War II, the pressing need to house tens of thousands of returning GIs made home styles turn strictly utilitarian.  Stucco was used because it was cheap, but little attempt was made at creativity.  The dreary legacy of postwar tract housing gave stucco its undeserved reputation as a slapdash, built-on-the-cheap material.

The inspired stucco design of the Bungalow era isn’t lost, however—it’s just dormant.  Here are some ways to capitalize on stucco:

•  Take advantage of its plasticity, or ability to be modeled into any shape.  Stucco can easily form arches, vaults, and even compound curves.  All that’s required is a rough wooden framework that approximates the final shape.  Turrets, serpentine walls, and bulging forms are just a few of the possibilities.

But stucco was just as adaptable to more modest homes,

such as this 1920s-era California Bungalow.

It's still a great choice today.

•  Use stucco to suggest mass and solidity.  Handle it like masonry, not like exterior wallpaper.  Make design features such as columns stout enough to look structural, using the same proportions that stone might require.  The Bungalow builders excelled at making inexpensive wood-framed homes look very massive, and using stucco three-dimensionally was the key to this trick.

•  Use stucco’s many available textures.  If you’re adding onto a home with an unusual stucco texture, find a contractor who’s willing to match it. If you’re building a new house, take a drive through some prewar stucco neighborhoods.  You’ll find a huge variety of textures, each the “signature” of its creator.  You’ll also find a lot of great design ideas. 

THEY DON'T BUILD 'EM LIKE THEY USED TO...THANK HEAVEN

When I hear people say, “They sure don’t build houses like they used to,.”  I think to myself, “Yeah, and it's a good thing, too.”

Granted, the quality of many items in new homes--doors, paint, hardware, and so on--can’t measure up to that of their vintage counterparts. But when it comes to actual structure and infrastructure, there’s no comparison.

This would never happen to a modern house, because
modern framing systems have shear walls.

Starting at the bottom of things--the foundation--modern houses are already way ahead. Prewar foundations had little or no reinforcing steel in them, which is why sticking doors and crooked floors are so common in vintage houses. Thanks to increasingly stringent codes for earthquake safety, modern foundations contain plenty of reinforcement., which has the added benefit them level and in one piece. 

Building codes also require today’s houses to be much more robustly framed than their predecessors, many of which had shockingly weak structures. Victorian houses, for instance, typically sat atop tottering “cripple walls” that made these already spindly and top-heavy structures even more susceptible to earthquakes, hurricanes, and flood damage. Today, the use of inexpensive metal framing connectors such as joist hangers and tie  straps produce far stronger houses at a very modest additional cost.

Galvanized water pipe was used
through the 1950s. This is what
most of it now looks like inside.

Modern building infrastructure such as plumbing, heating, and electrical systems are also leagues beyond their vintage counterparts. Take plumbing systems, for example--prewar homes typically used rust- and occlusion-prone galvanized steel water piping. Most modern plumbing systems, on the other hand, use durable, trouble-free copper. 

Likewise, houses predating 1940 or so employed knob-and-tube wiring systems with cloth-insulated wires that were embrittled by heat and attractive to rodents. Worse, these systems were protected by simple plug fuses that could be (and often were) circumvented by clueless owners--the infamous “penny in the fusebox” trick that led to many an electrical fire. 

Knob-and tube wiring like this was common from the
1900s until World War II. As you can see,
a lot of it is an accident waiting to happen.

Modern home electrical systems, on the other hand, use circuit breakers that can’t be tampered with. They also provide ample electrical capacity and plenty of outlets, doing away with the tangles of dangerous extension cords so ubiquitous in old houses. 

And speaking of fires, it’s no accident that fewer deadly fires occur in newer homes than in older ones. Rather, it’s because today’s building codes require interlinked smoke detectors, and many codes now also require fire sprinklers as well. Together, these improvements have dramatically reduced the incidence of fatal house fires.

These old furnaces were cool to look at, but
were dismally inefficient. They can't hold
a candle to today's modern forced air units.

Lastly, and perhaps most apparent to us in day to day life, new houses are far and away more comfortable and energy efficient than their old-time predecessors. Although we like to think of homes from the “good old days” as being warm and snug,  most lacked wall and attic insulation to conserve heat and instead relied on huge, wasteful gas furnaces to keep them warm. 

Thanks to modern energy efficiency standards, however, gone are the days of huge furnaces that lost over half of their heat energy up the chimney or by radiation from poorly-insulated ductwork. Today’s high-efficency furnaces, coupled with other features such as mandatory floor, wall, and ceiling insulation, mean modern houses are many times more energy-efficient than grandma’s cottage was.

Given all these improvements, next time you hear someone say, “They don’t build houses like they used to,” tell them they’re absolutely right.

PAINTING: The Last Place To Cut Corners

A friend of mine is an expert plaster and drywall finisher with almost fifty years in the trade. Not long ago, he knocked himself out on a very labor-intensive plastering job. Instead of kudos, though, he got a complaint from the owner, who said:

You can get away with cutting corners in some areas

of construction. Painting isn't one of them.

“Jimmy, they painted the walls, but I’m really unhappy with the way they came out.”

“Who did the painting?” asked my friend the plasterer.

“A couple of college students," replied the owner.

Tradespeople tell these kinds of horror stories all the time. Besides being entertaining, they can give remodelers an object lesson in the things that really matter: You can scrimp a little here and there, but don’t ever cut corners on the finishes that meet the eye—be they on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, or the roof. 

Yahoo paint work.

As it happens, my plasterer friend went back to see what the owner was complaining about, and his heart sank: The college kids--who probably had four hours of painting experience between them—had ruined all his painstaking plasterwork in one gloppy coat. Although my friend did manage to undo all this damage, it cost the owner a lot more than he’d “saved” by hiring cheapo painters. Next time, my friend advised him, he’d do better to hire a pro and not a couple of yahoos on summer break.

Sound advice, of course. The trouble is, for most remodelers, those final, all-important finish phases happen late in the job, at just about the same time their money is running out. This makes it excruciatingly tempting to hire low-bid, quick-and-dirty practitioners who’ll ruin all the hard work done before them. 

More yahoo paint work. Notice the paint on the knob trim

 It takes about two minutes to remove the lockset

 from a door,  and that's what these

clowns should have done.

Don’t fall into this trap. Instead, set aside an ironclad, untouchable reserve for the very best professional finish work you can reasonably afford. This is especially critical if you tend to be an impulsive buyer, and are always tempted to spend “just a little bit more” on unplanned extras along the way. It’s this kind of “feature creep” that exhausts budgets at just the time the finish work comes around. 

Your reserve for finishes should ensure that you can afford decent quality stucco, roofing, hardwood flooring, and carpet, but above all, it should provide for top-quality painting. Why? Because, of all the aforementioned trades, painting is the only one that homeowners wrongly assume any fool can do. Well, any fool can paint, all right, but the results will speak for themselves. 

Beyond yahoo. Two little screws, twenty seconds,

and they could have done the job right.

It’s perfectly reasonable to shop for bargains on materials such as lumber, pipe, electrical wire, and so on. You may even be able to cut costs by using salvaged material or providing sweat equity on framing, plumbing, or what have you. As long as these invisible portions of the job are safe and adequate, no one will ever know or care that you didn’t pay top dollar for them. 

Not so with finishes. Slapdash work will be right there, staring you in the face every morning. Save where you will, but don’t save on the surfaces that meet the eye. 

DATING YOUR HOUSE—BY ITS DOORS

Typical late-Victorian "Eastlake"

style door point to a

construction date around 1890

There’s a little parlor trick I like to pull when I’m doing architectural consulting at people’s homes. I ask them what year their house was built, and before they can answer, I quickly stop them with a raised hand. 

“No, don’t tell me,” I insist. After a brief show of Kreskin-like concentration, I give them my guess with a flourish. I seldom miss the construction date by more than five years. Often, I’m within two years, and occasionally I’m right on the money. The look of astonishment on the homeowners’ faces is always gratifying.

Like most parlor tricks, this one is easy to explain. It relies on a simple and rather prosaic yardstick found in every house: Its doors. Unless the place has gone through one of those ghastly home-improvement-emporium “renovations”—in which case the owners would not bother calling me in the first place—the doors are usually original to the house, offering a clear indication of when the place was built. 

Craftsman-era door,

suggesting a construction

date between 1900 and

1925 or so.

Right off the bat, a quick glance at the door panel arrangement will usually get you within ten or fifteen years of the construction date. For example, very tall doors with pairs of narrow vertical panels are a dead giveaway to Victorian era work, yielding a construction date between 1850 and 1900. This broad range can be further narrowed using another test: The more ornate the doors, the later in the nineteenth century the house was built. 

   Interior doors with a mortise lock

like this one (also seen in the

above two images) usually

indicate a house predating 1925 or so.

Doors with five stacked horizontal panels, on the other hand, indicate a Craftsman era pedigree--roughly 1900 to 1925. Those with a single large recessed panel indicate a vintage between 1925 and 1950 or so. Doors with no panels at all--so-called flush or slab doors--point to a modernist-era construction date between the early 1950s and 1980. Molded hardboard doors imitating various traditional panel arrangements point to a construction date between 1985 and the present.

The type of lockset that’s installed in a door furnishes other clues. If the door has a mortise lock (evidenced by a tall, skinny plate in the door edge and doorknobs fastened to a square shaft by setscrews), the house almost certainly predates 1925, although such locks were still used in basement rooms and garages for another decade or two.

"Cylindrical" locksets like this one

invariably postdate 1920,

the year they were introduced.

Knob styles vary widely, and offer

another clue to construction date.

This particular style was very popular

in the 1960s.

On the other hand, doors with just a small rectangular latch plate in the door edge invariably mean the house postdates 1920--the year when Walter Schlage invented the easier-to-install cylindrical lockset that quickly drove the mortise lock off the market. 

Doorknobs, too, have a tale to tell. Mortise locksets with ornate metal or glass knobs suggest late nineteenth century construction dates, while those with plain white, brown or black glass knobs are more typical of early twentieth century houses. Cylindrical locksets with knobs resembling giant glass jewels easily peg a home’s construction date between 1920 and 1935. 

Even hinges can provide clues. Ornate hinges with spiky ornamental pins typify Victorian-era houses. Hinges with plain leaves and ball-tipped pins hark from the Craftsman era, but remained popular through the Depression. Hinges with plain, flat-tipped pins indicate houses postdating World War II, while those with round-cornered plates are a hallmark of mass-produced prehung doors, putting a home’s construction date after 1970.

REMODELING MYTHS

After 30 years in architecture, I still hear the same tired old wives tales circulated about remodeling. It’s amazing how long it can take to stamp out a wrong-headed concept. Here are some of my un-favorites:

Replacement windows: As far as energy savings goes,

they're basically a waste of money.

1. Bathrooms should be planned back to back to save cost. Rubbish. This chestnut goes way back, and probably stems from the practice of placing apartment house bathrooms back to back. You’re not building apartments, however, so the meager savings in plumbing cost--something on the order of a few hundred dollars--doesn’t justify straitjacketing your floor plan with a bathroom arrangement you don’t like.

2.  The best way to improve your home’s energy efficiency is by installing new double-glazed windows. Poppycock. In most houses, windows represent a very small fraction of the total heat loss. By far the most heat is lost through ceilings, so attic insulation is the best place to put your energy-efficiency dollars. Once that’s done, consider installing a higher-efficiency furnace and ductwork. Replacing your windows is far down the list of cost-effective energy improvements.

This year's fad: Grey.

Chasing the "latest" color trends is a great way

 to make your house look dated.

3. Remodeling is the perfect chance to choose finishes in the latest colors. Balderdash. Unless you’re aiming for a remodel that’ll be painfully outdated in five years or so, avoid “current” colors like the plague. Choose colors because you like them, not because you read about them in some trendoid home magazine.

4. Skylights are the best way to get daylight into your house. Malarkey. Skylights are a good last resort to improve daylighting, but adding windows should always be your first choice. Why? Because 

Skylight: They're beautiful, but

they can't do what a window can.

 they’re passive solar devices naturally attuned to the seasons, letting in more low-angle sunlight in winter when you want it, and excluding it in summer when you don’t. Skylights do just the reverse. They also look out of place on many styles of homes, particularly those built before World War II.

5. Point-of-use (“tankless”) water heaters are the most efficient way to heat water. Maybe, maybe not. Tankless units can be just the thing for certain applications, such as bathrooms that are remote from the water heater. But their efficiency is typically oversold, with efficiency ratings based on rarified laboratory conditions that are seldom reflected in actual installations. They’re also complex and subject to erratic response under low flow conditions. What’s more, if saving space isn’t your primary concern, there are a number of conventional storage water heaters available with efficiencies in the mid-nineties, some at surprisingly reasonable cost. 

Recessed can lights:

Beware the Swiss Cheese ceiling.

6. Recessed “can” lights are the best way to modernize a home’s lighting. Piffle. Recessed lighting is useful for very specific purposes--highlighting permanent objects or architectural features, for example--but they do a lousy job of general illumination. This is because cans are inherently directional, creating a pool of light beneath them, rather than diffusing light throughout the room. They’re also terribly overused, leading to the notorious “swiss cheese ceiling” effect seen in so many remodeled houses. Be sparing in your use of recessed cans--and if you have a house predating World War II, think twice about using them at all. They’re literally a glaring anachronism in most older homes.

HOME ADDITION DO'S AND DON'TS

A hand-drawn "as-built" floor plan is fine, as long as

your measurements are accurate. Or...

Last time, we looked at all the un-sexy preliminary steps that are necessary enroute to designing a home addition. Not one of them, you’ll recall, involved any drawing. Rather, there was a lot of preliminary wish-list making (creating the program), fact-gathering (the survey), and ensuring that what you want to build conforms to local zoning codes (your conference with the local planner).

Now, armed with the confidence that your scheme won’t get blown out of the water by unanticipated restrictions, you can move on the the next step:

...if you want to get fancy, you can use a

consumer-level CAD application such as Sketchup

to show your existing house.

• Measure your existing house and draw the floor plan to scale, whether on paper or using a consumer-level drafting program--there are several available at a reasonable price, and others that are free. Take your time and measure carefully, as the success or failure of some designs can come down to mere half-inches.

• Using the existing floor plan you’ve drawn--and following the planner’s guidelines for the area that’s buildable--determine how the addition will communicate with the existing house. Don’t settle for a half-baked solution such as passing through a bedroom--provide a proper hallway even if it means having to recoup the lost space someplace else. At this stage, you’ll be wasting your time if you’re making neat, careful drawings. Just hang loose, drawing rough bubble-shaped rooms on inexpensive tracing paper. Don’t get stuck on one idea right at the outset--try out as many different solutions as you can.

But DON'T waste your time trying to do preliminary

design on the computer. Rough bubble diagrams

drawn with pencil and paper are much faster and

 less of a creative constraint.

• Still using rough bubble diagrams, determine the ideal solar orientation for each of the new spaces. Typically, major living areas such as family rooms should face south where they’ll get maximum sun. Kitchens and breakfast rooms ideally face east to southeast, while bedrooms are faced to suit the sleeper’s preference for morning sunshine or the absence of it. The least important rooms, such as the garage, secondary baths, laundry rooms, and the like, are given the least desirable northern orientation. Don’t expect perfection, but remember that a decent attempt is better than nothing. 

•  Only now should you begin sketching out some preliminary drawings using straight lines. Whether you’re working on paper or computer, pay careful attention to crucial minimum dimensions such as the width of hallways (rock bottom minimum,  three feet wide), stairs (ditto), clothes closet depths (two feet minimum), and kitchen aisles widths (no less than four feet). You’ll be sorely tempted to cheat on these minimums in order to wedge in just a few more of the features you crave. Don’t--you’ll end up with a nonfunctional and obviously amateur plan. Always err on the generous side.

The irony: If your addition design is really successful,

no one will ever notice it.

• When you think you’ve included everything you want--or you’ve tossed out the spaces or features that simply don’t fit--you can finally begin the “hard-line” drawings of your floor plan using a computer or drafting tools. Note how many steps were necessary before even getting to the portion of the work that most people consider “architecture”. 

It’s the willingness to lay this often tedious groundwork that distinguishes a thoughtful, well-designed end product from standard amateur-hour bungling. Whether you choose to tell admirers how much work your project entailed—or whether, Like Frank Lloyd Wright, you claim you shook it out of your sleeve—is up to you.

HOME ADDITION DO'S AND DON'TS Part One of Two Parts

Tired of people asking how he came up with his brilliant designs, Frank Lloyd Wright once famously explained,

“Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeve.”

Wright liked to say he just

shook designs out of his sleeve.

Not likely.

It was mostly Wright’s puckish sense of humor talking when he claimed to conjure fully-formed concepts out of thin air. Yet today there’s still a widespread misperception that architects design by invoking some kind of arcane creative voodoo, and that ideas just flow onto the paper without effort.

Alas, there’s a lot more hard work than magic involved in designing a building. This is a great advantage to non-architects, though you might not realize it. It means that if you’re methodical and willing to carry out what is often a tedious process, you, too, could shake a decent design out of your sleeve.

Suppose, for example, that you want to build an addition onto your house. Long before you ever put pencil to paper or finger to iPad, here’s what you need to do:

• Come up with what architects call the “program”--basically, a wish list for your project. As a minimum, it should describe what kind of rooms and spaces you want to add, roughly how many square feet each will require, and which rooms will have to adjoin each other. The program can also include more abstract requirements, from general atmosphere (sunny, restful, dramatic, or whatever) or any other qualities you have in mind. In general, the more complete your program, the smoother your design process will be.

A survey such as this one

will show where your

property lines are—and they

may surprise you.

• Obtain a survey from a licensed civil engineer or surveyor showing where your home sits on your property, as well as major artificial and natural features such as outbuildings, utilities, rock outcroppings, sloping land, large trees, drainage swales, and so on. It should also show any rights-of-way, reserves, or easements that could prevent you from building on the land.

• Add up the total square footage of the addition as dictated by your program and, if it seems that there’s enough room on your property to accommodate it, proceed to the next step (if not, downsize your plans accordingly). Armed with your survey, set up an appointment with a planner at your local building department to discuss your proposed addition. Begin by requesting the property setbacks--the minimum distance you must keep structures from the front, side, and rear property lines. Next, ask for the maximum allowable building height in your neighborhood. 

Your local planning department

will tell you your zoning,

which in turn will tell you

where you can build,

and where you can't.

As obvious as these steps may seem, they’re commonly overlooked by do-it-yourself designers, who typically rush directly into drawing detailed plans only to find out that their ideas don’t comply with one or more of these restrictions. Far from being an antagonist, a good planner will be a great help early on, pointing out such potential booby traps, and perhaps even suggesting alternatives that’ll help you circumvent them. 

What you’ll take away from this meeting are the following crucial bits of information: How many square feet of addition you can build, where and how high you can build them, and whether or not you need to notify your neighbors in order to do so. Next time, we’ll use that information to begin--finally--designing your addition.

KNEE-JERK NOVELTY

"It does not matter how badly you paint,” said the English writer George Moore, “so long as you don't paint badly like other people."

The same might be said for architects, whose professional success is just as dependent on novelty the commercial success of artists is.  To achieve even a small measure of recognition, architects, like artists, have to stand out from their colleagues. Some do so naturally, others with strained intent. One thing for sure, though: it’s a rare architect who hopes to remain anonymous.

Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall,

at the Illinois Institute of Technology:

A really cool building—except in summer.

As another sage observer—New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable—once put it, “Architecture is not immune to the lure of celebrity and shock value in a society that cultivates the new and novel at any cost.” 

A quality of novelty, or even visual offense, is often inseparable from any progressive work of architecture. It took Americans decades to appreciate the hovering, solids-and-voids compositions of Frank Lloyd Wright. It may take us just as long to understand the colliding sculptural forms of Frank Gehry. Still, we can be reasonably assured that, however unfamiliar such works may seem at first, there’s some very deliberate thinking behind them.  

Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe housing project,

St. Louis:  It seemed like a good idea

at the time.

On the other hand, there’s no shortage of buildings that were at the leading edge of their time, yet whose novelty nevertheless fell mildly or even disastrously short of their users’ needs. High-profile examples spring easily to mind: Mies van der Rohe’s glass-box buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose occupants routinely plastered the windows with aluminum foil to avoid being roasted by the summer sun; Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, where patrons were obliged to view art while countering the gravitational pull of the building’s celebrated spiral ramp underfoot; and Minoru Yamasaki’s infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project, a carefully calculated social engineering experiment that failed on virtually every level before the buildings were imploded in 1972.  

And these, mind you, are works by the best and brightest of their day. In the absence of such genius, less skilled architects secure novelty by simply borrowing from current fashion. In the modernist era, this entailed stripping already formulaic buildings down to barren, antiseptic blocks. Today’s architectural hacks employ the opposite strategy, taking otherwise mundane work and hanging a lot of gimcracks on it. This, after all, is also an easy way to make something mundane look novel—as Victorian architects, 1950s auto stylists, and even Liberace might attest. 

This explains why more and more new buildings sprout arrays of nonfunctional sunshades, brackets, outriggers, and other superficial bric-a-brac, their architects in hot pursuit of some hey-look-at-me status. In contrast to the textural poverty of modernism, disconcerted clutter is now the crutch for uninspired design. 

Recycled brick and wood

in a Carr Jones-designed residence in

Piedmont, California:

Green architecture from 1932.

How ironic, then, that some of the most truly novel architectural works of the past hundred years have been carried out by architects who remained barely known in their own eras. The Arizona Spanish Revival master Josias Joesler, the industrial architect Albert Kahn, California’s green design pioneer Carr Jones—all were virtually overlooked by their more celebrated contemporaries. 

And all of them, alas, reaped the perverse reward of such a career: their truly novel ways of thinking did come to be fully appreciated, but only long after they’d left us.