What New Houses Will Look Like

 I just read and article in my Florida Realtors newsletter about what the architecture of a new house will look like once the market for new builds revives.  It is and easy read and I agree with what it predicts.

Here is the most interesting part of the article:

"Andy Chambers has seen the boom and the bust. He’s president of both MasterCraft Builder Group and the Northeast Florida Builders Association. “Are people going to build bigger, higher-cost houses for the most part?” he said. “I think not.”

Rooms that encourage just a single use -- formal living rooms and dining rooms, isolated media rooms --will be the first to go.

“People are just looking more carefully at the space that’s useful,” said Skinner.

In coming years, look for multi-use rooms of flexible design, featuring lots of open space. That central living area is more spacious, tied into a kitchen that’s functional but not over-the-top.

The family area will be focused even more so around the TV screen, which will be even larger, said Skinner: “The TV has taken the spotlight, and people aren’t as ashamed of it as they used to be.”

He also expects kitchens to be more practical than extravagant. And bathrooms? They won’t be the “palaces” of past years. They’ll be nice, sure. But who really needs a palace for a bathroom?

Skinner said there’s plenty of room in the future for modern-looking houses, but he expects something of a return to a more traditional look. “I think there’s this sense of what a home looks like,” he said. “Proportions will become closer to something that looks classically driven; the scale of homes will be more pleasing to the eye. There’s been a lot of movement in the directions of neighborhoods that are more into the Avondale, Riverside, San Marco design.”

For years, people have been envisioning smart “Jetsons”-style houses packed with centralized high-tech systems that will run the whole building.  Those predictions were likely overblown, said Chambers, the builders association president. “The high-tech houses, quite honestly, have never taken off, and I think that’s because technology has exceeded the high-tech houses, because of wireless for the most part.”

And the much-ballyhooed green house?  People are slowly moving that way, though Leinenweber points out that most green construction methods remain too expensive for widespread use. Better insulation and more efficient windows, however, have come down in price enough to be popular.

Leinenweber said he’s also seeing less reliance on conventional building materials. Instead, there’s more cement composite siding and recycled plastic and PVC trim."

One key issue this article leaves out is the trend toward multi-generation living. Parents and a divorced child with kids of her own sharing Mom's house. Children moving in to care for a parent; a sick and aging parent moving in with a child rather than a nursing home (the parent usually bringing along an income and some nice assets). It's very evident here and, in this Great Recession, very practical. Moranda is selling lots of six bedroom houses in Palm Coast!