An architecture critic tries building his own home
Can a man who makes a career out of critiquing the professional work of others find happiness in a home of his own design? And what's with that tiny bathroom?
What happens when an architecture critic designs a house? It's not quite the same as if a music critic were to attempt the "Emperor" Concerto, or a restaurant critic commandeer Canlis's kitchen for the night. Those events would be ephemeral, hustled quickly into past tense if not quite forgotten. I'm living in this house for the rest of my life.
I've nourished a passion for architecture for the last three decades, writing regularly on it for national magazines and newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the past four years. (Here's my last column in today's issue.) I studied architecture history in grad school, but took no hands-on design courses; I never craved to actually practice architecture. This was wise. When I built my sailboat, I noticed that I have an almost immaculate inability to visualize three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional plans. The boat works, but only because I built most of it twice. I have to see something in three dimensions to understand why it doesn't work, then take it apart and do it over again. This is what I do as architecture critic, just omitting the do-over part.
My wife Patty and I began prospecting for Whidbey Island land a couple of years ago. We've always wanted to commission an architect-designed house, but every time we got close, financial reality intervened. This time, an architect friend from our years in Arizona made a stunningly generous offer: he’d do the conceptual design for the cost of a plane ride to see the site. Then we could have a local architect develop working drawings at relatively modest cost.
Did I mention reality? I interviewed architects and contractors in the neighborhood, and what I kept hearing was: minimum $250 per square foot, and that's with Ikea cabinets. Tom Kundig, one of Seattle’s most respected residential architects, recently told me $350 would be more realistic. At the $250 level, a 1,600-square-foot house on a $200,000 lot would have totaled $600,000. At that we were well over our budget — we weren't shopping for a wink-o-matic loan — even without site prep, landscaping, or the inevitable contingencies. Sadly, we shelved our good friend's offer.
Why should custom building cost so outrageously? There's a panoply of underlying issues, but at bottom is the nature of the homebuilding business. Contractors are not artists who thrive on innovation and challenge; they're tradespeople who want to get the job done and roll rapidly on to the next one. They hate tackling anything they haven't done before, so if they have to do it, they build in a hefty nuisance surcharge. Modern architecture is a nuisance.
We found a developer-owned lot we liked, and the builder already had an approved plan for a 1,975-square-foot house that he'd build for substantially less than that theoretical 1,600-footer. It was a conventional Northwest rambler tricked out with ridiculous neo-Craftsman detailing, but it looked like something I could work with. We made a deal: I would redesign it over the existing footprint, then take it back to the original architect for a reality check and new working drawings.
I bought a T-square and architect's scale and cleared the dining table. Most architects haven't drawn on paper for decades, but I wasn't about to entangle my life in learning CAD (computer-aided design). Over a week that encrusted the floor with a sedimentary layer of eraser crumbs, I stripped the Craftsman clutter off the elevation and added a few contemporary details such as a frameless triangular clerestory, trying to reposition the house somewhere nearer the 21st century. I revised the floor plan to mesh with the life we envisioned. Everything seemed to work, but I couldn't dismiss the lesson of the sailboat: We wouldn't really know until the house appeared in three dimensions.
The architect who'd drawn the original plan was unlike any I've dealt with in my writing about architecture: he had pictures of Jesus in his office, but none of buildings. Still, he went to work on my plans with a professional attitude and demonstrated adept problem-solving. He easily untangled a circulation mess I'd created between bath and bedroom, and probably saved us a thousand dollars through the simple expedient of lowering roof pitch. I had slashed and burned frippery to cut costs, but missed the obvious.
The house arose last spring as we camped in a nearby rental to monitor progress. There came the usual array of surprises, each inevitably ringing up some addition to the bill. I was happily surprised by the builder’s care with quality and detail. The miters on the door and window frames were more accurate than the painstaking joinery I'd committed on my sailboat.
A week after we moved in, my amateur design errors were brutally obvious. Most were errors of dimension, my failure to accurately envision the functionality, or the feeling, of a space as I drew it on paper. We need 25 percent more window in the east wall of the great room for morning light. The guest bathroom is a foot too narrow. The entry hall is a foot too high. After complaining for years about dumb homebuilders who hang uncovered decks in the Seattle drizzle to go unused nine months of the year, I designed a dumb covered one, too narrow to accommodate four people around a table.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Feb 24, 6:19 a.m. inappropriate
I'm living in a studs remodel I completed a year ago, and know the feelings you describe. Take faith though that these failings are likely more apparent to you than to others. (At least some of them!)
Best of luck to you in your future life endeavors - and the sharing of the lessons learned.
Posted Tue, Feb 24, 9:55 a.m. inappropriate
"It's time to quit beating yourself up and enjoy the house." Sage advice from your wife. Wasn't that the takeaway lesson you gave us in The Year of the Boat?
The message wasn't lost on me, having struggled all my life with the issue of when to stop working on A and move on to B. (C, D, E, ad infinitum).
For what it's worth, I bought four copies of your lovely book and gave three away as Christmas presents to friends, some as detail-obsessed as I. The remaining copy is on my desk, well thumbed.
If you promise not to beat yourself up too much again in print, I promise, sight unseen, to buy four copies of The Year of the House. A worthy book project for our current hard times. Enough said. I have to go polish the silverware.
Posted Tue, Feb 24, 1:14 p.m. inappropriate
Regarding reasons for the high cost of custom design, I believe it has mostly to do with the economy of scale the production builders can achieve when repeatedly building the same few designs with lower cost labor. I have observed production builders start and finish a $650,000 2800 sf new house within about 4 months. That was for fairly high end tract home design. This contrasts with the 18 months (and much higher per sf cost) it has taken us to build a custom architect designed home nearby. The builders who take on custom homes are in a totally different business model than production, and they will never be able compete on price with tract home developments. There are many satisfactions with being able to design and build a custom home for your family, but saving time and money is certainly not one of them.
Posted Thu, Feb 26, 9:06 a.m. inappropriate
Incredible! How long have you been an architectural critic? Do you know more than one architect? If you did, you'd have easily discovered that the cost of hiring an architect yields benefit far beyond their fee. That barter for conceptual plans would have been a bargain like no other. Now youre stuck with a crappy house that when you choose to sell, will bring the lowest offer you can bear to accept. Nice going, Mr Critic...
Posted Tue, Mar 3, 3:25 p.m. inappropriate
Critic Larry Cheek took the absolutely worst way to do a personal home for himself and his family. I was astounded and then dismayed at Larry's lack of understanding of the rather complex process of designing a custom home that fits one's own needs and is buildable at an affordable cost. All of his many essays on design quality that I've read (and enjoyed and often agreed with) indicated an entirely different sensibility toward custom residential architecture that I've specialized in these many years.
It's entirely different from picking a suit or anything else off the rack. Most "Critics"- architectural or other- come at their subjects from the finished side. What he describes in his Crosscut piece is definitely not how a meaningful "out of the mud" project is conceived and constructed.
My many years of residential design experience have taught me otherwise. (Using my GI-Bill T-square) I go about doing a true custom home as shown on my WebSite (http://jgropp2.googlepages.com/alterationsanadditions) and my many Google "Knols" which help to explain the process as well as show the results.
Posted Wed, Mar 4, 8:30 a.m. inappropriate
Ah well, your first house. Don't worry, you'll start to really figure it all out on your third.
Posted Thu, Mar 19, 1:47 p.m. inappropriate
Mr. Cheek,
I've listened to you on KUOW in the past and thought you were quite skilled at maintaining a conversation about architecture. But to be honest, I've never been very impressed with your writings of "criticism." When you called the Mosler Lofts by Mithun "the most interesting and provocative residential high-rise to appear in Seattle since World War II" (PI 12/25/2007), I just about fell over laughing. Mosler's not the worst project, just far from best, and clearly doesn't deserve unabashed praise. It's questionable why an Architectural Critic doesn't express more critical thought. Maybe it's because of what happened to Sherri Olson...
Now, from reading your anecdote of self-performed home design, my worst suspicions of you are confirmed. I do not wish to lampoon your poor design sense (you made it obvious that you are not educated or trained as a designer), instead I question your values. Clearly you should not be designing but, as a supposed champion of Architecture, your neglect in commissioning one of Seattle's many deserving, talented and qualified young firms calls into question your commitment to our architectural community. You need not hire Tom Kundig and build a $300/sf house to make good architecture.
Maybe the Architectural Critic position is just a job, not something you take too personally. That's unfortunate at best. I hope you continue to have success in writing about hobby boat building.
-concerned about Architecture and Criticism