One of life’s great injustices is the failure of too many people with too much money to exercise either good judgment or imagination or both when they build their “dream house.” It’s disappointing how many of them want houses that look pretty much like all the spec developments they rejected: barely warmed-over variations on historicist pastiches that are supposed to look as if they’ve been there as long as the houses on the block that haven’t been torn down yet.
But in many neighborhoods, what they’re building looks nothing like a house that’s actually been there for all that time. If people were building a house on the 1900 block of Burling in 1905 — when the rest of the neighborhood was developed — they wouldn’t put up a 16,000-square-foot marble palace on four lots. For the sake of historic accuacy it would make about as much sense to build a car wash.
All of this is relative, of course, and we admit to a bias toward modernism. In the interest of balanced coverage, this criticism is worth nothing that when a historic rendition nails it. A pair of houses on the 3400 block of Greenview (pictured above) illustrates this point neatly.
You could say the house on the left is the urban design equivalent of a unicorn — that which was thought to exist only as a fantasy: a historic revival style city house that’s thoughtfully designed and appropriate to its site. From the suburban architects Myefski Cook Associates, it’s pleasantly-proportioned, handsomely detailed and its Queen Anne-ish eclecticism makes it seem particularly correct for the neighborhood, where most of the houses predate World War I.
Conversely, the house on the right is sort of a textbook example of What Not To Build (which will not, we hope, be an upcoming offering on TLC). Even if we could overlook the clunky massing (Why does the front entrance seem squeezed in, like an afterthought? And what’s with the parapet wall above the second floor?), the vulgar castellated styling is flat-out offensive and should be somehow legally actionable. Everything about it is wrong for the block.
Rich people didn’t start building lavish residences that looked like Elizabethan manor houses until the boom years of the 1920s. If you want to see what this house aspires to (and fails at pretty miserably), check out the 300 block of Wellington:
