For nearly an hour the eight people carried on a non-stop discussion in a conference room lined with home site maps. Talk had touched on everything from the pitch of the roof to meatball-shaped shrubs, the precise width of shutters and puddled water at the base of the berm.
At one point, Alexander “Sandy” Stuart, president of the posh Lake Forest development called Conway Farms, turned to Maria St. Ville and solemnly said, “The interior of your home can be a swimming pool, a giant lap pool, if you wish. It’s the exterior we’re concerned about.”
Indeed.
Stuart was directing a meeting of his development’s architectural review board, a committee of architects, a landscape designer and representatives of the City of Lake Forest as well as Conway Farms. This rather august group gathers monthly to OK, modify or reject the plans for proposed homes that owners of lots — costing from a quarter- to a half-million dollars — hope to build at Conway Farms.
Such review boards exist throughout the Chicago area and across the country in both upscale and more mainstream housing developments that want to maintain a particular look or aura in the residences as well as landscaping and streetscape.
St. Ville and husband Edward, a radiologist, own a lot at Conway and she was at that board meeting with the architect who designed the house of their dreams, Karl Strassburger of McLean Strassburger & Associates of Northfield.
This was the second time that the pair had been in session with the board and there’d be a third time before their plans “sailed through with full approval.”
Though some buyers in developments with such boards talk about the agonies of going through a half-dozen or more meetings, things moved along briskly at this Conway session. No raised voices, ruffled feathers or serious objections.
Suggested changes, for example, were often prefaced with “this is minor, but …”
Nonetheless, the mention of architectural review boards can make some people wince. Such committees have picked up an unseemly reputation for strangling an architect’s creativity or stunting a builder’s growth potential, for depriving homeowners of their inalienable rights, for discouraging diversity and, most damning, for delaying a home’s progress and adding thousands of dollars in extra costs.
“Taste commandos,” scoffs a builder’s spokesperson.
“At the outset, such boards probably seem to benefit no one in particular,” says Schaumburg-based real estate consultant and analyst Tracy Cross.
“It’s one of those things where beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he says, but the only beholders are people on the board.
As time goes on, he claims, “It’s the board that upholds the integrity of the community.” That means it keeps the community the way the developer, as well as the homeowners who’ve gone through the same process, want it to look.
Architectural review boards are most often found in large housing communities funded by a developer who creates a master plan, installs the infrastructure and perhaps recreational facilities, then sells lots to builders and/or individuals.
Such developments are far different from communities or subdivisions operated by builders who purchase tracts of land, build the infrastructure and also design and sell the homes.
The home buyers’ input includes choosing location, the style of the home and upgrades versus standard amenities.
In both types of developments, the builder and developer first go through the procedures of dealing with the municipalities that govern their proposed sites. All housing, be it an individual single-family home, a high-rise or a 1,000-unit development, must follow the zoning regulations, ordinances and just plain rules of the town or city in which it is built.
Those rules could involve density, parking, height, relation of size of home to lot and much more.
And then there are the homeowners associations, which have their own sets of commandments that might range from hiring maintenance firms to banning flamingos in the front yard or determining swimming pool hours.
The “covenants, conditions and restrictions” for the homeowners association of Thornwood in South Elgin is loaded with definitions and details from budgets to insurance to life’s little traumas: A no-go to clotheslines, “discharge of firearms,” above-ground pools, window air conditioners. But, a basketball hoop is OK with written approval; so are two pets.
Architectural boards are another matter. They may differ in how they operate, but their most significant common denominator is that they–not the owner, architect or builder–make the final decisions about the exterior design and appearance of the homes.
At 380-acre Conway Farms, which will have 282 homes, the majority of the lots are sold to individuals who hire architects or builders to design and put up their homes on 1/2- to 1 1/2-acre sites, with prime spots facing the golf course.
Conway may well have one of the more prestigious and exacting boards. On it are Howard Decker, of DLK Architecture in Chicago and a participant in the conversion of Fort Sheridan; Kristine Boyaris, a principal of Lake Forest Landmark Development and a senior member of Lake Forest’s building review board; and regular members Kathryn Quinn, who heads her own achitectural firm, and Tim Christie, a professional landscape designer and manager of the homeowner association.
At Fox Mill, west of downtown St. Charles, 95 percent of the buyers are builders who sell spec homes or build to suit. Its architectural review committee, which meets weekly, includes three members of the developer’s team, an independent architect who put together the guidelines and, when necessary, a builder and homeowner. Fifteen builders are regulars and have completed 279 of the total 689 sites.
Wynstone in North Barrington, Royal Melbourne in Long Grove, and Thornwood in South Elgin are other such developments that have utilized some type of architectural governance.
It’s the developer that has “the vision” or “the concept” for the look and, yes, price ranges of lots and homes that will define their communities or developments (never ever to be called “projects”).
From their viewpoint, everything they do benefits the homeowners.
“We’ve reviewed 130 homes,” says Conway’s Stuart. “The people who go through it have become the board’s most ardent defenders.”
“Having standards assures homeowners that the next home will be as desirable as theirs,” says Marvin Bailey, senior vice president of Crown Community Development of Aurora. The firm’s Thornwood community in South Elgin has guidelines for its proposed nine neighborhoods that expect to have 1,030 single-family homes and 300 town homes; 21 builders, thus far, will build homes from $215,000 to $1 million.
“With multiple builders often side by side, standards are even more important,” says Bailey. “Typically, they preserve value and owners resonate with that. When they’re building a custom or semi-custom home, owners don’t want an exact duplicate across the street.”
The aim at Thornwood is visual interest by way of varied styles, meaning the anti-monotony rules are strict. So are the relationships of garages to streets. Meetings are held as needed, generally with three members of the developer’s staff and builders.
Then, too, developers have come up with booklets and brochures with photos, drawings and exact descriptions of what’s in or out.
Fox Mill’s developer, B & B Enterprises of St. Charles, has guidelines with visuals that show “appropriate” and “inappropriate” character, styles, site characteristics and details, from window flower boxes, trellises, dormers, windows and doors to columns and more.
“There’s no right or wrong,” says architect Emilio Miniscalco of St. Charles, who formulated those guidelines.
Initially, Fox Mill had no review board. After some homes went up, B & B saw that “the houses were nice,” says Miniscalco, but “they mixed some of this and some of that. We want homes to have an authentic architectural style.”
He’s emphatic: “We are not dictating.”
True. Fox Mill approves of many architectural styles: Colonial, Tudor, Georgian, Cape Cod, Victorian, Farmhouse and others.
“The problem is that many styles get labeled as a Georgian or Colonial without defining that style,” according to Miniscalco.
What they don’t want are styles that “years and years from now will say, `this is an ’80s or ’90s home.’ We want homes to age gracefully, like neighborhoods used to.”
Developers and architects often loathe what some builders and homeowners love and want: Trendy homes in the colors of the moment, be they teal or coral; with Palladian windows (a classic, curved-at-the-top style) that are bloated, out of proportion or elongated to two-story heights.
Generally, trendy windows are strongly discouraged, as are shutters that are smaller or larger than the width of the windows; homes going up on corner lots or the first home in a development’s new phase get top priority with review boards who scrutinize the plans relentlessly. (The first homes that a visitor sees must leave good impressions.)
Conway Farms’ elaborately detailed architecture and landscape guidelines include all the heavy-duty stuff dealing with heights and sites, plus an array of no-nos: No flat roofs, concrete driveways, metal or plastic awnings, flood lights, single-car garages.
The easiest way for the consumer to deal with such boards, developers say, is to go with an architect or builder who’s worked in the community of their choice.
Maria St. Ville, for example, totally credits the “smoothness” of the entire review procedure to architect Strassburger.
“He is talented,” says St. Ville. Far more than that, “He was able to both interpret and incorporate our taste with his design.”
It helps that Strassburger was one of the first three or four architects approved to build at Conway and has since completed about 15 homes there. The Conway team say Strassburger knows pretty well “what will fly,” and his design for the St. Villes was lauded from the beginning because it would fit so well with “the Conway and Lake Forest tradition.”
Plans for the two-story, Country French, off-white stucco home with brick and timber details are waiting for city approval; Strassburger hopes to break ground in early November.
He says “visualizing a house is one of the key stumbling blocks in building a house,” and one of the prime rules for getting through it all is “to be realistic about budget numbers to start with. The key is communicating about everything–down to the look and cost of the doorstops.” He adds: “That calls for a lot of hand-holding.”
Interior designer Lori Lennon probably wishes she’d started with a Strassburger type.
Friends and her business contacts have long heard of her nomadic travails since she and her husband, Don Lynch, bought a site at Conway Farms and went through the rigors of dealing with the architectural board.
“I thought I was so smart,” she said recently, “that I could just fly through those procedures. I loved them talking about good design, about wanting consistency.” Then she groans, “Boy, did I learn a lot.”
Lennon and her architect thought they had a “wonderful design, but the review board suggested changes in the windows.” Then it was a matter of “the square footage included the attic space, which we hadn’t done,” then the shutter design had to be changed three times, then disagreement about a coach light.
“I went through three different architects before I got what I wanted,” she said. “The first backed off because he didn’t want to have to deal with changing things. The second one was fine, but he was so over budget, we couldn’t build that particular house. The third redrew the plans to fit our budget and the last one didn’t think his work needed to be reviewed. He resented the changes and charged me accordingly.”
Though Lennon’s barbs were being heard by her acquaintances as criticism against the board, she said, “I didn’t realize that what we came up with could be improved, but every change they suggested made the design better.
“When I would question something, they were credible, professional and I would agree with them,” said Lennon, adding, “I had no negative experience with them, but I still don’t agree about the coach light.”
Builders, however, often get more flak than architects for being uncooperative or wanting to build “only what they know will sell,” say some developers, but not for attribution.
But the senior vice president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago, David Craft, says builders are in favor of review committees “because such communities have a better look and feel. The fabric and texture of a community is what you see when you drive down a street.”
Craft, president of United Homes, says the only problems arise when “an ordinance or a guideline is not clear.”
Though Miniscalco says Fox Mill has had an “incredible retention rate for builders,” he and others involved with architectural reviews acknowledge they’ve lost builders and lot owners because their ideas didn’t harmonize.
Thornwood’s Bailey says sometimes a potential homeowner walks away because he or she may be determined to have a trendy home.
“Right now, five or six gables are the symbol of a new home,” but, they’re not for Thornwood, he indicates. “If a developer’s principles are at risk, we have to be honest and say no.”
But, what if a buyer comes up with a classic–say an authentic log cabin design, or submitted a Frank Gehry-designed home based on his Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain? Could–or would–an architectural review board dare say, “Sorry, no go”?
“Our intent is not to say no to any style if done appropriately,” says Fox Mill’s Miniscalco. “But no one’s approached us with plans for a log cabin.”
Thornwood’s Bailey says, “Our communities are not for everyone. Individualists who want to do whatever they want to do won’t be happy living anywhere that a builder or developer says, `This is our vision.’ “
And from Conway Farm’s Stuart: “There are some who have a style different from our vocabulary.”
Diplomats all.
