Department of the Exterior
Cookie-cutter home designs, over time, go stale. For a fresh look for your next project, heed these do's and don'ts
By Paul Rogers CTW Features

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Don't litter the neighborhood: Architectural designs get copied - and when they're bad, that means more homes are making the same mistakes. Understanding the right design principles and materials can help make your home more pleasing - both aesthetically and financially.

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but people judge homes by their exteriors all the time. And more and more frequently these days, those judgments aren't exactly glowing.

"Over the last 10 years, new construction has blown through this nation like a storm," says Judy Gaman, owner of remodeling and design firm La Dame Aux Lavande Designs, Southlake, Texas, and co-author of the book "What Not to Build: Do's and Don'ts of Exterior Home Design" (Creative Homeowner, 2006). "It has come fast and furious and left many casualties behind … in the form of poorly designed homes that might fit the trends now but will grow to be eyesores as time passes."

Gaman is not referring to floor plans or décor but to a home's "elevation" - the straight-on views of the exterior. Everyone wants a goodlooking home, and beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but Gaman and co-authors Sandra Edelman and Robby Reid believe the demands of mass production, coupled with copycat designs done by firms lacking architectural training, have helped usher in an era of aesthetically deficient façades. And that era is showing few signs of ending.

The authors had no shortage of examples for the book, which is filled with before-and-after shots of what not to build contrasted with what to build. Poor designs were not hard to find (in fact, the authors sifted through more than 400 examples), and they're getting easier to locate every day, since the bad-design phenomena is self-perpetuating.

A builder constructs a home, for example, in a "hot" neighborhood and sells it in an instant. So, the company repeats the design. The thinking is that the first buyer snatched it up so others will too - when in actuality, it was the neighborhood, perhaps a high-demand school district, that did the selling.

"Home design is not revolutionary, it's evolutionary, where people keep replicating the design," says Reid, a Dallas-based architect. "So when there's a flaw, it keeps getting repeated."

"People get used to things and start thinking features like a really high double archway is nor- mal because that's what they see everywhere," says Edelman, owner of home-design and remodeling agency Edel Designs, Southlake, Texas.

A portion of the home-building industry has lost touch with - or never even learned - the five design principles of mass, balance, scale, proportion and rhythm. Mass refers to the shapes of the structure, from the sections of the house to the windows and doors. Balance is the visual relationship of all the parts of the house on either side of an imaginary line drawn through the center. Scale is the size relationship of elements judged by a point of reference. Proportion (related to both size and balance) is how the parts relate to one another or the whole. Rhythm is the patterned repetition of elements. All need to work together, but these days they often do not.

Builders are constructing more and more houses with disproportionate columns and dormers, too-tall gables, unbalanced façades, conflicting rhythms in the forms of multiple materials, colors, textures or window shapes, and dozens of other design transgressions.

"If you study old houses, even big mansions, they are really quite simple in the number of shapes and materials," says Edelman. "Simplify. Do not have so many competing shapes and elements. Keep it to two window shapes, not three or four. Simplified is richer."

One of the biggest problems these days is "over-materializing," says Gaman. "It seems like everyone wants a little stone, a little brick and, oh yeah, a little stucco while we are at it."

Mixing many materials doesn't automatically add visual interest to the home. In fact, the materials often work against each other, creating a cluttered, chaotic look, particularly when applied in small pieces to different areas of the house.

Another big problem: Grandiose entries "so out of scale that they throw everything off," says Reid.

Certainly, a house's exterior says something about the person living there. "People want to have houses that symbolize themselves. They are trying to make a statement to their neighbors," says Reid.

But oversized entryways often make the opposite statement. "Most people look at houses like that and see them as overdone … Those kinds of houses are not welcoming, they don't have human scale," Reid says.

Architects, designers and builders need to respond to such demands for homes that make a statement but achieve it using classic design principles, the authors say.

There really are no tangible reasons for poor design. It's neither a time nor money issue. Often, good design reduces costs by reducing materials for false ornamentation, oversized dormers and gables, multiple exterior finishes and soaring entryways.

"It's not about spending more, just about doing it right," says Gaman. "It's about balance, proportion, and when it's done, it intuitively looks good. Buyers may not be able to tell why it looks good, but they want to go inside."

Similarly, homebuyers will "viscerally react" to an ugly home, not always knowing why.

One of the reasons Gaman, Edelman and Reid wrote the book was to give the average homebuyer the vocabulary to describe what it is they like and dislike about a home. And that's really the bottom line: wanting buyers to like the home. This is about more than aesthetics. A house with an ostentatious façade could come back to haunt you when it comes time to sell.

It might not have made a difference a couple years ago, but when the housing market stalls, a home that just doesn't look right is going to be tougher to sell than one that does.

The book is a good argument for a homeowners' association, says Gaman. "When a house looks bad, it not only hurts the resalability of that house but those around it." If a half-dozen homes in a subdivision don't follow the principles of design, she says, "it's like littering the neighborhood."