Hi everyone, here’s an article from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine that caught my eye. The title alone, “A Better House for Your Money: It Can Only Happen Now, It Must Happen in the 1970s,” sparked my curiosity.
It’s an impassioned plea from the writer for good residential design, and I found it pretty interesting, especially given the article was written over fifty years ago. It’s a unique perspective worth reading.
I don’t want to give too much of the article away. I’ll let you read it and form your own opinions.
Better Homes and Gardens, September 1969
The 1970s ought to see the best-looking houses this country has ever produced — especially if Better Homes and Gardens families pitch in to encourage good design. Eighteen houses on these four pages verify the point — each is the result of skillful “design thinking.”
The attractive appearance of a house is a combination of many factors. Pattern, texture, and color must be coordinated with scale, balance, and unity. When these elements are in step with one another, the design will be pleasing no matter what the style.
But the trouble with many houses today is that they have no style at all. Most often, they are a hodgepodge of details that seem to have borrowed one striking feature from each of the last ten years’ best sellers and rolled them all into one — with the builder hoping that this will give him his biggest seller yet. Others are just slavish reproductions of traditional favorites, or coldly stark boxes in the style many people erroneously associate with contemporary.
Good residential design is the result of updating the familiar with new materials and new technology. Look at our houses with shed roofs, for example. This type of roof is one of the oldest and simplest ever used, but when it’s combined with several newer details, the shed works to create a house with a surprisingly fresh appearance. But when it is combined with several new details, the shed works to create a house with a surprisingly fresh appearance.
Consider too our houses with mansard roofs. There’s one at the bottom of this page. This French style has been applied in a variety of ways, each very different, each very successful, but merely plunking a well-designed roof on a typical no-style house is a terrible mistake. Harmony of all elements is vitally important, so be wary of the builder who offers the same two-story house with a choice of gabled or mansard roof. Take just two familiar elements of a house, the shape and the siding. Each has a great impact on the overall appearance. It’s important to decide whether you want the siding to add texture————-
0r sleek lines. And whether the roof should soar or hug the ground, for the house to come off well, there must be coordination of all elements. This doesn’t mean houses with sleek siding must have flat roofs, nor does it mean every house with shingle siding must be a replica of a Cape Cod or a New England salt box. We show two houses here with salt box shapes, but they’re hardly replicas. The designers picked up this idea from the past and combined it with modern siding materials for a truly handsome result.
There are examples of how better building products and economical construction can revitalize a pleasant and successful design of yesteryear. The result is something up-to-date, honest, and in many ways better than its ancestors. Analyze our photographs that show old-fashioned shingles on advanced-looking homes. The desired rustic mood has been achieved, but there’s the added benefit of a total house that offers much more inconvenience and living comfort than an original Cape Cod ever could. Windows are another important key to good design. Any size or any type of window would serve its primary purpose, to let in light, but only windows that are properly placed and positioned look right from the outside.
Every house here demonstrates how windows can and should be used to attain the proper result of good design. Even so, there’s no need to slavishly follow a particular style. The house recalling a Spanish hacienda has windows that are definitely contemporary. Its appeal results from an effective blending of the best of both old and new.
For the first time you visit a new house, be ready to reject a cliché-ridden sales pitch. Better home design is urgently needed in the 70s and will happen only if we make it happen. Sit down with the builder and discuss how the house was designed, just as you carefully discuss the financial arrangements. Your mortgage, of course, should be tailored for you by a professional. So should the house, because you, not the builder or his sales manager, will live in it.
So what did you think? I feel the author’s head would explode with the cookie-cutter and McMansion building trends that have plagued the home-building industry in recent years. I completely understand his push for unique home design. This is why I wanted to create a platform for people like myself who are interested in homes and the design culture from this period. So continue to join us here at Modern Paper Houses – the design evolution of 70s and 80s contemporary homes. We explore and celebrate the renovation and preservation of these structures.
To explore more homes built in the 1970s that embody the strong style and design criteria championed by this writer, be sure to check out my post House Gallery: Photo Collection
And thanks for stopping by Modern Paper Houses.
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