Greys, and actually all colors, are grouped into two types, cool and warm. Cool greys have underlying blue tints. Warm greys have underlying tan or yellow tints. It’s easy to remember the terms if you think of ice being cold and blue while wood is brown and warm.

One common example of grey tones is seen most automobile interiors. We don’t have many choices of interior colors for cars these days. The choice is usually limited to black, tan, or grey. The tan is essentially a warm grey and the grey that is usually used is a cool, bluish grey. To get an idea of how greys can clash, imagine if you had a cool grey interior in your car and the door to the glove compartment was tan. Anyone with good color vision would readily see that something was wrong.  A warm grey mortar would look just as bad if it was used with a bluish grey stone on your house. Similarly, a cool grey grout would look bad with yellow or brown tile on your bathroom floor.

These same principles apply to all color selections. Match warm colors with warm colors and cool colors with cool colors.

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One aspect of the entrance to a house that you may overlook or under-appreciate is the concept of transition from public to private. This is a concept I discuss in some detail in Designing Your Perfect House. The minds of human beings seek order. Our minds don’t like abrupt changes. We are most comfortable with gradual transitions. If you consider the sensation when you step from your dark bedroom in the middle of the night and turn on the light in the bathroom, you get a pretty good idea of how harsh a change can feel. Our psyche reacts to changes in spaces, albeit subconsciously, the same way. Sudden shifts from one type of space to another can be jarring and disconcerting.

When approaching and entering a house, the entry experience is a transition from the public domain of the street to the private domain of your home. Unfortunately, many houses are built where this transition occurs in one or two steps. Think of houses where you simply walk up to the front door and step through right into the living room. I guarantee this feels uncomfortable to you even if you can’t explain it except to say that it seems to compromise the privacy of the living room. Actually what is happening is there was no “middle place” to let your mind adjust from public to private.

Front steps, porches, vestibules, and defined foyers are all part of a better entry transition from public to private. A front step and porch are still open to the public, but they have some private aspect to them since they belong to the house and the porch might even be covered, thus making it become a little bit of an indoor space. Your foyer is much more private because it is behind your front door, but it is not as private as your family room. It still carries some publicness because you greet guests there, visitors can see into it from the front door, and there is no sitting furniture indicating that people linger there.

I was in New Jersey recently and I noticed this lovely, unique entry experience.

This house faces a fairly busy street, but the columns and roof overhang “claim” a piece of the public space for the house. If you step onto the front porch, you feel that you have stepped out of the public realm and into a more private place. The front porch space is somewhat cozy since it wraps around the visitor, embracing them and making them feel welcomed. It lets you anticipate the next step into the foyer. And what really struck me is the creative and unusual way these spaces were created. This is hardly your standard front porch. It speaks of character and expresses something a typical front porch would miss.

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In a recent blog post by Clem Labine, publisher of Traditional Building magazine and Period Homes magazine, takes on the topic. Here’s a little of what he had to say in his post entitled Hard-Edged Houses for Those Who Love Machines:

Modernist architects once again are trying to sell hard-edged houses to the American public. A new home plan service called Hometta has been set up to offer “modern homes for the masses.” Hometta is a collaboration of several architectural studios whose goal is to provide “small, sleek, sustainable, affordable house plans for middle-class buyers.” Few would quibble with the goals of “small” or “affordable” or “sustainable.” Whether the market will applaud their version of “sleek” and “modern” remains to be seen.

His suspicion of how the public will receive the modernist offerings is shared by me. If you were to poll the public you would find a strong majority favoring houses that match their image of “home.” By that I mean a house with a pitched roof, windows of a human scale, comfortable places for comfy furniture, and not a house that looks like a museum for modern art.

I like to believe that a home-like house can be created in a modern or contemporary style. But nearly every modern house I’ve seen recently is not homey and would not even qualify as good modern design. Last year I was attending an architectural conference in Charleston and we took a tour of “significant houses” in the area. Much to my disappointment we did not visit any houses that were traditional. One after another they were severe, unfriendly and hard-edged. Clem Labine would have hated them. In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I discuss how to “people” spaces. What I mean by peopling is making the spaces feel right for people to occupy and feel like you would expect people to be there now or soon. This has everything to do with providing the proper scale, materials that are indicative of requiring the human touch, and places where people fit properly.

Modernist house in the Charleston area. This is actually the front side that greets the owners and visitors when they arrive. Not only is the scale, use of materials, and form unappealing to human beings, there is no sense of arrival and the front door is totally invisible. The purplish material is oxidizing copper.

Later in his article, Clem Labine compares the Katrina Cottages by Steve Mouzon to the modernist houses and claims they are meeting the sustainability, cost, and size goals the modernist houses strive for, yet the Katrina Cottages also meet the goal of feeling like “house” and “home” to everyday people (like me). He says:

Ironically, the Katrina Cottages designed by Steve Mouzon offers the emotional reassurance of traditional architecture – but is actually the product of technology and the machine. The cottage is a low-cost modular house designed to be “small, affordable and sustainable.” But rather than an in-your-face declaration of machine-love like the Binary House, the Katrina Cottage offers the softer outlines of traditional architecture and conveys the aura of hand-built houses.

KATRINA COTTAGE VIII by Steve Mouzon/Housing International, Miami Beach, FL

I posted a comment of my own:

Clem – You’re right on the mark. I was trained in a Modernist philosophy, like most architects these days. We get heavily indoctrinated in the mantra that anything traditional must be rejected and modern is the only proper architectural language. I agree with Bob’s comment (author of an earlier comment than mine) that this kind of thinking ignores the lessons learned over the years about how to deal with rain, sun, wind, etc. But more importantly, strict modernism ignores the psychological lessons that are a part of our culture and grown within the human experience. It is pure vanity on the part of architects to say that all that has come before was wrong and only we, the modern architects, can create the forms that properly respond to mankind.

I think that this kind of attitude hinders our profession and is a disservice to the public. I wrote my book, Designing Your Perfect House precisely to empower homeowners and clients to help them understand why they feel the way they do about their houses and help them understand that they can ask for more than what’s on the architect’s menu. The solution to the blight in house design is not simply convincing the architects to do better, but to help the public feel more confident to demand better.

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And just what’s so appealing about a Sub Zero? Obviously it is a very good product. They have great features such as two individual compressors, one for the freezer side and one for the refrigerator side. Many of their super deluxe models have specialty features you probably didn’t even know you needed until they told you. But I think the single most valuable feature of a Sub Zero is the fact that it is “cabinet depth.” This means the front of the refrigerator sits even with the face of the lower cabinets and front edge of the countertop. It doesn’t stick out several inches like standard refrigerators and look like a big bulky box in the kitchen. With a cabinet panel installed on the doors of the Sub Zero, the bulkiest object in the kitchen, the refrigerator, can take a less intrusive position in your kitchen and give the entire kitchen a more unitized and cleaner look.

Sub Zero isn’t the only manufacturer of cabinet depth refrigerators. GE Monogram, Liebherr, LG, and a few other manufacturers now offer cabinet depth refrigerators. However, cabinet depth refrigerators are usually fairly expensive and many people feel they lack enough depth inside to be as useful to them as they might prefer.

Is there another solution? Fortunately there is. If the layout of the kitchen and the rooms the kitchen adjoins will allow it, a recess can be created in the wall behind the refrigerator to allow a standard depth refrigerator to be pushed back further than normal. A six inch deep recess in the wall (only behind the refrigerator and not behind the other cabinets) should allow you to tuck the unit back and keep the refrigerator door approximately even with the base cabinets. Choose a refrigerator that allows you to put cabinet panels on the front and install vertical cabinet panels on each side of the space for the refrigerator to create an alcove for the refrigerator. When you slide the fridge into place, it will be nearly identical in appearance to the expensive cabinet depth variety. You can get the good look of a built in while keeping the interior depth of a standard refrigerator and save a few thousand dollars in the process.

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You might not know exactly what I mean by a “good house form.” We architects often use the word “massing.” This refers to the overall shape and bulk of a building. It’s the shape of the structure and roof line in its gross form. It ignores the finer details. It relates to composition, balance, visual flow and a lot of other artistic terms that even professionals have trouble expressing in words. But a good house form is one we know when we see it. One way to evaluate a house form is to stand back and squint at it. This will keep the details from confusing your mind. A good house starts with a good house form. The details will further enhance it, making it even better. But it’s hard to save a bad form with expensive materials and details. A house has to have “good bones.”

Here's a house that caught my attention recently.

I drive by this house frequently and every time I find myself giving it a good look. So one day I stopped and took this picture so I could see it in more detail without driving into a ditch. What’s very curious about it is that it breaks many of the “rules” of design. You could call it a little squat and inelegant. You could criticize the arbitrary gable that was placed on the front. Most of us would have been compelled to center the front door below this gable and certainly add another window in the center on the second level to help make the gable “frame” some other elements. You could say that the portico is skimpy and the gingerbread ornamentation is contrived. You could even say that the paint scheme is a bit cutesy.  And you would be correct on all counts.

But don’t the heavy chimneys frame the house nicely? Doesn’t the gable-topped bay around the side of the house complement the one on the front wall, bringing the side porch into the composition and forcing you to look at the house in three dimensions? And did you even notice the complete lack of foundation planting? The only real landscaping are the two large, flanking trees. But even in winter with leafless trees, doesn’t this house simply “feel” good?

Just as in this house, good house forms are much more than the sum of their parts. They are a synthesis of many things. And they often ignore the rules with pleasing results. These are some of the intangibles you need to consider when Designing Your Perfect House.

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Austin, Texas – the state capital and home to the University of Texas – has long been known as a liberal bastion in a conservative state, and the city’s residents are renowned for their environmental consciousness. But it wasn’t the community’s mind-set that led to the establishment of the nation’s first comprehensive green building program; it was a nuclear power plant.

A nuclear power plant and sustainable building and green do not seem to go together. But the question of whether or not the city should buy into a nuclear project led to the introduction of an energy code in 1985 and it started the Austin Energy Star Homes program that spawned the Energy Star program nationally.

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    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    Most people don’t think about how their bathroom tile will be installed. They make their selections based on the color and style of the tile and what decorative tiles or accents are available and compatible with the primary tile. But not all tiles are available with bull-nosed edges or other special shapes you may need.

    A bull-nose edge is a slightly rounded over edge that has the finished surface of the tile wrapping all the way around the edge so that when it is adhered to the wall, nothing but a finished surface will be seen. Bull-nosed tiles are also needed when the tile must wrap around a corner, such as on a tub deck where the vertical front surface meets the horizontal top surface. Many tiles do not come with this accessory. In those cases, the edge of the tile will appear unfinished and possibly rough when installed. Some tiles, like porcelain tiles, can be rounded over and ground to be smooth by the tilesetter. This will prevent the tile from having rough edges, but many times the color of the body of the tile is not the same as the finished surface. In other words, the color you see on top does not run all the way though the tile. Other tiles, like ceramic tiles, can not be properly ground down to make a rough edge no matter how skillful your tilesetter may be.

    Depending on your particular installation, you may also need tiles that are finished on two edges to form an outside corner. Another problem presented by some tiles is when the tile can not be cut smoothly. On a recent project, we ended up with tiles where the finished surface tended to chip off when cut, no matter what method of cutting the tilesetter tried. Even when he ground down the edge, the rough, chipped edge still showed.

    I would suggest that you discuss the tile installation with your builder and the tile setter before you finalize you tile choice, just to be sure the final installation will match your expectations.

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    The golden mean offers a comfortable proportion with which to work, but it’s not the only comfortable proportion, so you don’t have to feel locked into it. The intriguing thing about the golden mean, about placing things at this scale, is that it just about always works. Consider it a safety net for proportions.

     A bit of architectural trivia: A classic and pervasive curved shape used to this day in crown moldings, wood trims, and other architectural details is the “ogee” curve. The “ogee” is a direct derivative of the golden mean. This curve originates with the Greeks and shows up in the columns we place on our front porches, crown moldings we place in our living rooms, and even the curves that are shaped into the aluminum gutters outside our houses. Who knew that ancient Greek classical design would eventually create aluminum gutters?

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    I talked yesterday about the value of painting out larger samples of your wall and trim paint selections to verify that the colors were right. The same principles applies to the other materials you plan to use. Don’t pick bricks from a photo or even from a brick sample card with several thin bricks on it. Without mortar, the bricks will look different than they will on your house. Stone is even tougher. I can’t imagine being confident in a stone selection from a handful of loose stones. Stones come in a very wide range of colors, textures, and sizes. And there is no good way to describe stone in words. Photos of other walls help, but you need to be sure your builder can reproduce the wall you want.

    Insist that your builder construct a sample wall where you can see the “real” finished product.

Homebuilding Stone Samples

    In this photo, the stone mason has laid up three sample panels with several mortar joint options. You cans see two of them in this closer view.

Mortar Joints in a Stone Wall

    The top joint is called a “raked” joint. The mortar has been scraped back to let the edges of the stones show more. The lower joint is a brushed joint where the mortar is flush with the face of the stone and brushed somewhat smooth with a bristle brush. You can see that the effects are remarkably different.

    Simply picking the brick or stone for your house is not enough information for you to give your builder. It leaves too much to the imagination. You need to decide upon the color of the mortar, the way the mortar is “struck” or “tooled,” and you need to be sure you, your architect, the builder, and the mason all have the same image in mind for the final wall. The only sure-fire way to do this is to lay up a sample wall and create a physical sample. If the first samples don’t capture the look you want, pull it down and try again. The small cost of doing this will save you thousands in unnecessary cost, not to mention the aggravation and angst of getting the wall wrong.

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