”You have to hit them right between the eyes.”
That classic philosophy, expounded by builder Tom Shannon, should be translated into Latin and inscribed on the banners of the 1989 Parade of Homes in Inverness. Something like In Medium Oculum Gottu Hittum.
The annual show for the public might well be called the Parade of Palaces, for with two notable exceptions, the 13 builders in this year`s exhibition, sponsored by the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago, have opted for unrestrained opulence.
”People have to want to buy a house like this-they don`t have to,” said Shannon, head of Shannon & Associates Ltd., expatiating on his thesis as he prowled his sprawling $1.25 million dwelling watching dozens of workers rushing around like Dodg`em cars to complete the house by the parade`s opening Saturday.
”You really have to do an exceptional job to motivate people to buy these places,” agreed Peter Di Iorio, president of Dior Builders, whose 7,500-square-foot monument to quiet grandeur, modestly dubbed Dynasty, is going for $1 million.
To get the $1 million and almost-a-million market to buy, the builders are strewing baubles ranging from gold-plated sink fixtures-$2,500 the set-to a dance floor to a media room with a 100-inch-diagonal projection TV system and surround sound.
Shannon`s 6,700-square-foot creation, Chenonceaux, administers its initial bash to the spectacles with a 20- by 20-foot foyer surrounded on three sides by a columned arcade reminiscent of a Roman villa, although Shannon himself calls the style Palm Springs.
The foyer is large enough swallow a grand piano if Shannon should decide to put one there, which he is thinking of doing. To attain such amplitude, he was forced to shift the stairs from the foyer, which in turn, he said, impelled him to install an indoor garden in the stairwell.
”We didn`t want a stairway in our focal point,” Shannon said. ”But we still wanted to have an interesting stairway, and that`s why we came up with the atrium garden effect.”
Thus wealth creates more wealth, at least on an unlimited budget.
Stroll through the columns to one side and you will find yourself in an octagonal library lined with cherry paneling, in case the piano man in the foyer fills you with a need for repose.
Chenonceaux`s other sight-spankers include a marble-tiled bathroom as large as a half-court basketball gym and a classical pediment over a powder room mirror, so even guests can imagine themselves grandees.
An octagonal sunroom is diagonally across the house from the octagonal library, with the same configuration suggested in the kitchen and breakfast room, all creating a multitude of angles and clipped corners that lend the house the charming quirkiness of an ancient manse.
These convolutions are reflected in the roofline, which is a thicket of triangular shapes sprouting stubby chimneys with cutout openings.
”We designed the house from the inside out,” Shannon said. ”The roof line is determined by the shape of the rooms.”
In his Dynasty, Peter Di Iorio conveys pomp and well-heeled circumstance in a somewhat more conservative fashion, as befits a former banker, by spending pots of money on sumptious details.
Entering through 8-foot doors carved in Mexico, you arrive in a foyer in which you could muster a squadron, with the officers observing from twin winding staircases by the light of a 5-foot-high by 5-foot-wide chandelier.
If the soldiers needed to be stationed at intervals, they could array themselves on walnut squares inlaid in the oak flooring throughout the ground level.
But the infantry should be kept downstairs, for in the master bathroom are the 24-karat gold-plated faucets and, over the tub, a $5,000 leaded-glass rose window that would do justice to a cathedral.
Those privileged to bathe in such splendor can recline by 12-foot columns in the master bedroom and gaze at their glowing fireplace, bedroom fireplaces being mandatory in abodes of this class.
When the ranks are ready, they can march out over the 50,000 paving bricks arranged in in intricate design that lead up to the house and around the circular carriageway.
The patterned bricks are repeated in the terrace with its fountain at the rear, the home`s formal outdoor space.
”Decks are so common,” Di Iorio said. ”We felt this is more formal. We wanted to get away from the rustic look of wood decks.”
Of course most of the people who will tour the homes between now and July 23, when the show closes, cannot afford to be so superior about decks and other such banalities.
”Of the 100,000 people who come through, perhaps only 1 or 2 in 1,000 can afford these houses,” said parade chairman Jerry O`Connor, pointing out that this show is the most opulent in the eight years the parades have been presented.
”But the homes incorporate all of the luxurious details that people may aspire to,” said O`Connor, head of J.P. O`Connor & Co., who will become Home Builders` president next year. ”There may be elements in each of these buildings that have quite widespread applicability or affordability.”
One these elements translatable for average-sized wallets is the sense of entry that all homes create in various ways. Ranging from the imposing and highly stylized to the comfortably informal, each entry sets the tone for the home.
The most extreme entryway is the medieval pointed tower that leads into the Calia Development Corp.`s $925,000 Chateau Maison. Inside, the shape creates a circular foyer that leads to round-arched openings, carrying on the medieval theme. A family room fireplace of the same stone as the tower can be seen from the foyer.
At Bongi Development Corp.`s $800,000 Savannah, dazzlingly patterned glass shoots up more than 20 feet to an arch above the front door. The fanciful brick of Diorio`s Dynasty leads to a broad arch surmounting the carved doors, with a pointed tower to the left, creating the feeling one should be arriving on horseback.
(For those uncomfortable in the saddle, a simple Rolls Royce will do. One builder was overheard complaining to a colleague that a car company was offering a Porsche instead of a Rolls to put in the driveway for the parade. If no Rolls, said the builder, his bottom line was a stretch Mercedes.)
At the other end of the spectrum is the cool, unpretentious veranda that sweeps along the front of Kimball Hill Inc.`s $965,000 Havenswood, a house done in ”Illinois vernacular” style that in its quiet way is the most intriguing design in the parade.
A fantasy world of foyers continues the entry treatments.
”I was in a builders` seminar once, and they said the foyer is the first thing your friends see,” said Ed Augustin, executive vice president of James Construction Co., who is in charge of building Tara, the company`s $975,000 offering in the parade.
Tara`s friends will see twin winding staircases for aspiring Scarletts to flounce up and down, set off by wallpaper in a gathered curtain pattern that suggests that the entire house is a stage set.
On the theory that staircases create excitement in a foyer, Prime Development Ltd. presents a foyer that is practically all staircase, with arriving visitors greeted immediately by a broad avalanche of steps cascading towards them.
”It`s pretty dramatic,” said Robert Lemke, Prime`s sales vice president.
DiMucci Development Corp.`s $970,000 Sandcastle goes for high glitter with an octagonal mirror set in the ceiling of the foyer, a treatment echoed by mirrored ceiling coffers in other areas. Sandcastle also has a lower level dance floor, which somehow goes with all the mirrors.
Ceilings in general are mirrored, molded, vaulted, trayed, peaked, barreled and every which way but flat-well, almost. Calia`s Chateau Maison has a barreled ceiling with painted clouds above the living room. The ceiling is backlit, so that the living room can be partly cloudy at night.
Decks, however humble in the eyes of some, proudly march behind, around and even through the houses. Kimball Hill`s Havenswood is constructed on three axes around a decked courtyard, creating a private outdoor space as well as giving at least two walls of light to almost all of the rooms.
The deck of DiMucci`s Sandcastle ambles on differing levels around the house, with a hot tub here and a gazebo there.
Cambridge Homes` $749,900 Carleton has 1,800 square feet of deck area alone, about the living space of the average 3-bedroom home.
The Carleton also has the parade`s most spectacular fireplace, set in the middle of the two-story family room/living room area between two white columns containing the flues that soar 20 feet to the top of the house. The pillars, which are echoed by a half-column supporting the staircase, provide a leaping, somehow joyous focal point to the house.
”The house is really ideal for entertaining,” said Cambridge president Richard Brown, noting that a loft overlooking the 20- by 30-foot family/living room is the right size for a grand piano or even a three-piece band.
There are dozens of fireplaces with all kinds of surrounds and mantels in materials from rough stone to granite to marble to cherry, but one of the smallest is also one of the most exquisitely placed, a three-sided glass affair dividing sitting room from sleeping room in the Havenswood master suite that subtly creates a center of warmth and intimacy.
The Havenswood master suite also is graced by a quietly elegant bathroom, with tub surmounted by wood columns and canopy that are pleasantly fanciful but not overwhelming. The simple columns recall those in the foyer.
(Everywhere you look in the parade there are columns, some appropriately placed, some not.)
As for bathrooms in general, if someone in 500 or 1,000 years were to happen on the ruins of Braymore, the DiMucci subdivision in which the parade is being held, they undoubtedly would surmise that it had been the center of a religious cult.
In each house the most sumptuously appointed, if not quite the largest, room contains a raised marble altar with a large depression in the center and ornate, sometimes gold-plated, fixtures embedded in it. The rooms are lined with the most lustrous marble, pure white, deep green, grey, blood red. The windows are of curious shapes, leaded, stained, even frosted with enormous figures.
These chambers are flanked with large ancillary rooms, probably for sacred vestments, future archeologists might think, and connected to other, simpler rooms with beds, no doubt to allow the devout to rest from their spiritual exertions.
Fortunately, today`s visitors won`t be prey to such confusion, and will know that bathrooms of a similar if not quite so awe-inspiring style are available even in comparatively modest houses.
Two homes less palatial than the rest, although certainly not modest, are the Havenswood and Landmark Homes` austerely named Plan 550D. The latter is the most private home, with tidily proportioned rooms well distinguished from each other, and a plenitude of quaint, fluted and rosetted woodwork that characterizes Landmark houses.
The Havenswood is a series of quite differentiated spaces, each with a marked character of its own but tied together by repeated architectural elements and by the daylight from the interior court that floods the home.
”The interrelationship of the elements in the house makes the statement rather than one gaudy feature,” said Kimball Hill president David Hill. ”The architect was designing with space and light, not with marble and gold.”
Parade visitors will see designs of both kinds.
Tickets are $6 for adults, $5 for senior citizens, with children under 12 admitted free.
A home building and services exhibit tent with 60 booths will be open, refreshments will be available and on weekends a clown and a balloon man will entertain.
Braymore is on Barrington Road just south of Dundee Road. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day through July 23.
