HGTV Dream Home 2009 Gets a Critique
I happened to run across HGTV’s Dream House 2009. Here it is.
The outside looks nice, but the plans are pretty bad.
Here’s the Comment I left on the Blog site.
“I am surprised that your “Dream Home” contains so many basic design errors and displays such a lack of solid design principles. Let me list a few that instantly come to mind.
1. A 3628 s.f. house is a big house, yet there is little good working surface in the kitchen. It looks like there is only the space on the island, and that is broken up with the sink, and then there is a couple of feet to either side of the cooktop. That’s it.
2. If the “island looking” thing between the Kitchen and the Family Room is just that, an island, then I would presume the dishwasher is next to the sink. So where would the upper glassware cabinet be? The isn’t one but you need one.
3. But if the island I just mentioned is a full-height wall and there are nice cabinets on it, then the kitchen is cut off from the Family Room, making the house end up broken up into individual rooms. This does not work well for today’s open living style.
4. The Family Room is a disaster to furnish. The fireplace would be much better on the side backing up to the staircase. In its current location, it blocks any view out the back, limits window area, thus diminishing natural ligth, and it juts out into the Rear Covered Porch making half of it virtually unusable.
5. You call this a great house for entertaining, yet it has a dead-end Living Room. To enhance flow, the major rooms of a house should have two ways in and out.
6. The Living Room is a relic of the past and will become an under-used, “museum” living room that no one uses. It is a waste of space.
7. And speaking of wasted space, the Dining Room is hardly the shape typical dining room furniture would fit into easily. There will be leftover areas that have no good use.
8. I would think that a house of this size would have a Butler’s Pantry to provide extra storage for dishes and serve as a bar when entertaining.
9. The Powder Room is an abomination. It is so cramped as to be virtually unusable.
The second floor is not much better.
1. I hope there is good sound insulation in the floor. Because when the washing machine and dryer are running, it will broadcast the sound through the floor into the main living space below!
2. The Laundry Room looks way too tight. I wonder how they’ll get the machines in and out, let alone work in there.
3. There is a door-over-door conflict in Bedroom #3 and its closet door.
4. There is no cross-ventilation in the sleeping area in the Master Bedroom.
5. The Master Closet door swings the wrong way so you would have to walk all the way around the door to get into it.
6. The big window above the Master Bath tub faces the front and presumably the street. So it will have a covering over it all times.
The outside looks nice, but the house lacks any sense of spatial efficiency. It also does not address universal design and aging in place. For a pretty good sized house, I find this one to be disappointing. Visit my website to learn about how to design a better house. www.designingyourperfecthouse.com
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Tags: architecture, Design, dream house, HGTV, homebuilding, house design, residential architecture
October 13th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
It just amazes me that there are no furnishings shown. Not only does furniture convey function, it also conveys a sense of scale. Not too much thought was put into this home. What a missed opprotunity.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Edward,
if you go to the HGTV website, you can get a full tour of the house which includes all the furnishings and landscaping of the house.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Does anyone know the brand/company make of the garage doors in the 2209 dream home, in Sonoma?
January 19th, 2009 at 1:51 am
Does anyone know the name brand for the garage doors, in the 2009 Dream Home?
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:05 am
that house is awesome.
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:16 pm
My question is why anyone would have the bedrooms in the front of the house. Its always seemed to be a very bad idea because of the street level noise that will bleed in through the windows.
April 18th, 2011 at 10:16 am
1.Not everyone wants openplan living – it’s perfectly possible to entertain in a non-open plan house.
2.The living room would be used because the tv would probably be there instead of the family room (no, you dont need a tv in both rooms).
3.The toilet (i’m guessing that’s what the Powder room is) isn’t that small, even if it looks small on the plan. It really doesn’t need to be any bigger for what it is.
April 28th, 2011 at 5:09 pm
BobbieShamrock – Thanks for your comments. The reason I said the powder room was too small is because it is only as wide as the door entering the powder room. Once you open the door, you will have the sink projecting off the wall in front of you. Imagine if you stepped inside a typical toilet stall in a public restroom and they had added a sink sticking out from the side and you will see what I mean.