By Katherine Salant
Many people who decide to build a large house have quite specific ideas about the style and look that they want to achieve, but Boston architect Jeremiah Eck said they fail to realize that what works well on a small house can be a disaster on a big one. Eck, who has been designing large houses in a variety of styles for almost 30 years, said that the spareness of modernism can look terrible on a big house, even in the hand of a master like Richard Neutra, one of the great American architects of the last century. Neutra's 14,500-square-foot Windshield House, built on Fisher's Island, N.Y., in 1938, "frankly looked ugly," Eck said. (The house was destroyed by fire in 1973).
Eck added that no client had ever asked him to design a large modernist house and that most clients shun this style for any sized house because they associate it with institutional and commercial buildings. Eck himself disliked Neutra's large house because it looked like a factory and not a home.
For Bill Sutton, an architect in Vienna, Va., even some traditional styles don't work at a large scale. The sheltering roof of an English country house can be very appealing, he said, but the second floor can't accommodate all the spaces that a person building a 5,000-square-foot house wants to put there.
Sutton added that clients who want big houses can be shocked to discover how big a 5,000-square-foot house can be, and how it will impact the local landscape. The first time he visits a site with clients, he always walks down the street to the spot where the house will first come into view. In the leafy Washington suburbs, it can be 300 feet away (the length of a football field). As the clients look back and forth between the spot and their lot, they start to realize that their new house will not sit unobtrusively behind a stand of pine trees, it will definitely be "out there."
On the other hand, in many parts of the country, a big house will not stand out, even if you're standing in the next block. Rather, it will be one of many in a new subdivision where it will have neither a commanding view nor a large lot. Dennis Danahy, a principal with Scheurer Architects in Newport Beach, Calif., said that his firm has designed 4,000-square-foot houses for 60-by-120-foot lots, a common size in many parts of the country now. With this lot size, the distance between houses can be as little as 10 feet on the sides and 40 feet at the back (each house is 20 feet from its rear lot line). To create views and privacy, Danahy designs these houses around interior courtyards. To keep them from overwhelming both the neighborhood and the neighbors, the rooms closest to the street and to the rear lot line tend to be one story, and the central portion two stories.
When his clients want to build a big, fancy house, Santa Barbara, Calif., architect Barry Berkus, who has been designing houses of all sizes for nearly 50 years, urges them to get beyond resale and luxury and seize the opportunity to have features and spaces for things they really care about, such as art, books, china, paperweights and even colored glass bottles. Instead of displaying their treasures in a haphazard fashion or never even unpacking them because there's no place to put them, owners of a big house have room to organize and display all their cherished pieces and make them a part of everyday life.
Berkus said a big house is also an opportunity to incorporate "memory spaces," his phrase for alcoves off bigger rooms or window seats where grandparents and grandkids can read together, build Lego castles, make a witches brew with everything in the spice cabinet and all those other silly things that create enduring memories for the next generation. When clients have young children themselves, Berkus encourages them to add spaces and features that their children's friends are unlikely to have so that the house can become a favorite hangout, and all the parents in the neighborhood will know where their children are.
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