Bob Gilbane bought a dream house by mail for $495. The ready-to-build plan of a charming, elaborate cottage–with columns and porches, wavy shingles and oval windows–was designed by one of the country’s best-known architects, Robert A.M. Stern.
Gilbane liked it so much when he saw it in Life magazine he made it the centerpiece of his new 80-acre subdivision here.
Naturally, there were some changes he wanted to make. He added a basement, something the plans did not include. And because the site he chose was on a hill, he added a patio and French doors opening out from the basement.
But then there were the changes he was forced to make. “Out of 21 pages, there were 11 errors,” the developer said ruefully. The dimensions didn’t quite line up: The first floor was almost two feet bigger than the foundation, he said. Gilbane’s workers quickly took down the skeletal walls and spread the difference across the width of the house.
Then there was the cost estimate. To add all the rich detailing the architect specified–“copper gutters, columns, scalloped cedar shingles and Dutch kicks on the overhangs,” he recalled–the house, estimated at $150,000 to build, would total $350,000. “The only way anybody could build it for $150,000,” Gilbane said, “is to use vinyl siding, square columns and a lot of compromises.”
After he and others pointed out the mistakes, the Stern office sent out plans correcting the errors. And Gilbane pronounced himself satisfied–he sold the house for $680,000. He is so satisfied, in fact, he is eying another Dream House plan, this one by a star-in-waiting, Dennis Wedlick.
Spurred by the annual Life Magazine Dream House series and fueled by the onslaught of home magazines, television shows and Internet sites, the house plan business is booming. Mark Englund, a partner at Home Styles Publishing and Marketing, which sells 25,000 house plans annually, estimates the industry at $50 million a year.
Most of the plans sold are still done by nameless boiler-plate draftsmen, but increasingly the big names–Stern, Michael Graves, Hugh Newell Jacobsen–are jumping in. And for young up-and-comers these houses-by-mail fulfill the populist mission to bring good design, if not to the masses, then at least to the middle-class.
“It’s long, long overdue,” said John Rattenbury at Taliesin, the firm Frank Lloyd Wright founded. In the tradition of the master, whose floor plans appeared in Life magazine in the 1930s, Taliesin sold several hundred plans last year through Life. “It’s one of the saddest things that people of moderate means are subject to a glaring lack of good design.”
Whether they choose them partly for cocktail-party bragging rights or for their aesthetic appeal, the people who have built the houses agree on one thing: They could have never afforded to hire these architects to build them a custom house.
“These Baby Boomers are starting to react against `bigger is better,’ ” Gilbane said. “People want houses with mahogany and trim–they don’t want a box Colonial.” House plans by known architects, he said, “are a great opportunity to get excellent design without paying them the $30,000 and $50,000 they’d charge as a fee.”
The difference in price can be substantial. For one thing, the architects who agree to draw these plans-to-go–and many refuse–deliberately design a house that can be built for families that are not wealthy. These dream houses-by-mail are usually no more than 2,500 square feet (Lilliputian by a star’s standard).
But as this populist ideal takes hold, its pitfalls are being hotly debated. Critics whisper that such commercial zeal cheapens the profession and devalues an architect’s services. And Kevin Ireton, a former builder who is the editor of Fine Homebuilding magazine, points to one of the biggest issues: With arms-length design-by-mail, the architect never meets the clients and never visits the site. “The main problem with buying a house plan in this way is that it isn’t designed for your specific site. That’s the reason a lot of architects don’t want to sell plans.”
Besides the $200 to $600 for the plans, the homeowner should expect to spend another couple of thousand dollars to have an architect adapt the plan for the site and the local building codes. Then, before a spade is stuck into the (hopefully not rocky) ground, there is the matter of the changes to the plan, which, judging from interviews, often turn out to be pretty major.
Take Laurie Kelley, who built another of Stern’s bungalows about a half-hour south of Gilbane’s house, in Wakefield, R.I.
Asked if she and her husband, Charlie, a computer programmer, built the house for $150,000, she replied: “No way. Not even close. We took out a mortgage, cashed out our retirement, took the money from our other house. I think it cost more like $250,000 to $275,000–and that was with us doing all the painting.
“We modified it a little bit,” she added, laughing. “We downsized it. We changed the inside. We expanded the kitchen, we narrowed the hallways, we made it more open. We’re still working on it.”
Such changes can be pretty shocking to the mega-architects–notorious perfectionists with their own dreams of the perfect Everyman house, built exactly as they planned it.
Asked if a house built from a Robert A.M. Stern plan–with no further input from the architect–was a Robert Stern house, Stern replied, “It is and it isn’t.” Shrugging, he compared the selling of house plans to rearing children. “You expect them to do their own thing.”
Michael Graves, who sold 108 plans for the 1995 Dream House he designed for Life, said he was “frankly, surprised–I guess I was naive–but I thought people would buy the plans and build the house, lock, stock and barrel, as I designed it. Or I thought that, if they wanted to make changes, they might ask us for a little drawing. But they didn’t.” And after they had built the house, they sent him photographs of what they had done, bragging that they had “added their little touches,” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm.
Nevertheless, Graves said he would consider doing it again. “Architects,” he said, “get a bad name for working only with the elite.”
Stern, who has sold 1,200 house plans, was so buoyed by his success that he is creating another Dream House, for This Old House magazine, with one big difference. This Dream House is designed for an actual site–and plans will not be sold until the prototype house is built, so that any little glitches can be ironed out. And he is exploring a way to license his designs–in effect, selling local architects the franchise to control the style of alterations that he will allow.
Across the country, many other architects are gearing up. Sarah Susanka, 41, of Minneapolis, who sold hundreds of plans through Better Homes and Gardens magazine and whose firm will design next year’s Dream House for Life magazine, has already signed a contract with a drafting service that will handle alterations to the plans for $60 an hour.
Others architects, like Melanie Taylor in New Haven, Conn., have established their own, separate, plan companies.
In interviews, these architects say their well-heeled clientele, who regularly pay them $50,000 fees for their smaller houses, have not complained about seeing their work touted in glossy magazines as “affordable housing.” They say their two client groups–millionaires and the middle-class–rarely intersect; so, the architects are not losing their high-end business.
And, as the mail-order business takes off, some see the color of money.
Hugh Newell Jacobsen jokes that he took the job designing the 1998 Life dream house to tap into his “own private oil well.” He added that “none of us are wandering monks out to save the world from bad taste.”
Other architects disagree, about both the mission and the money.
Taylor said she has only sold 400 plans since 1984. “It’s not a big source of income,” she said. Duo Dickinson, an architect in Madison, Conn., sold 30 plans of a small, stylish concrete house after it appeared in last August’s Better Homes and Gardens. Dickinson, 42, said he was paid only $5,000 to design the 2,600-square-foot house, replete with arches, gables and a vaulted, 17-foot ceiling.
“I had to sell 16 plans just to pay me back for my time,” he said.
“Some architects say it’s pedestrian,” he added. “For me, it’s the opposite: it’s doing the right thing.”
From Palladio to A.J. Downing to Frank Lloyd Wright, architects for centuries have been drawn to the Egotistic/Altruistic notion that the hoi polloi are just as deserving of great house designs as those living life at the top.
But those famous architects released their floor plans–not actual blueprints, some complete with electrical and plumbing diagrams. The house plan books were more like treatises, “with the plans as examples of the concepts,” said Wedlick. “They were meant to be inspirational–not an end in themselves like the plans are.”
To Wedlick, who created Life’s 1995 Dream House, the idea of creating a generic house for millions of Americans to read about was immensely tempting. “After all,” he said, “I was 34 years old, following Bob Stern,” replacing I.M. Pei, who backed out.
Now, at 38, he says he probably wouldn’t do it again.
“Buying a set of plans,” Wedlick said, “is not even close to hiring an architect; it’s an entirely different kind of animal. To me, it’s a little heartbreaking for someone not to get the full benefit of the design.”
Running the gamut of the job–from first meetings to see how a family uses its existing space to supervision of the builder at the site–Wedlick argued that hiring an architect is only slightly more expensive than building a big custom kitchen.
Wedlick, unlike several of his mail-order colleagues, visited as many of the Dream Houses built from his plans as he could find (278 were sold). (Melissa Stanton, the editor at Life who supervises the Dream House feature, said that many people who bought the plans “put them on a shelf, a kind of fantasy,” making any estimates of how many were built impossible.)
“I’m very proud of the way the Dream Houses were adapted by other architects,” Wedlick said. “And I’m happy that the people seem to be so happy in them but it is, in a way, nothing to do with me.”
One of the families Wedlick visited was Bill and Holli Siff, who built their Wedlick house in Contoocook, N.H., a piquant example of what he calls Modernist Romanticism, with his characteristic stacked window bays under a steeply peaked Hansel & Gretel roof–a Cotswold cottage drawn by Giacometti.
The first thing Siff did was hire a local architect to alter Wedlick’s plan.
First, they flipped it around, so what Wedlick envisioned as the front became the back.
Then they took the mud room out of the kitchen wing and put it in a new 10-foot-longer connection between house and garage, added a dormer window, closed up the see-through garage and changed its roofline, creating a bigger bedroom for the Siffs’ teenage daughter.
Referring to the change in the garage roof, Siff said sheepishly that “it looks like a motel.” He paused. “But we had to do it. We needed that bedroom.
“And the house still looks special,” he said, exulting, as his wife nodded vigorously. “People drive by, grind to a halt and just stare. It’s a really stunning looking house, and we love it.”
