Call it a return to basics. Term it a nod to the past. Label it a bow to competitive pressures.
Whatever you choose to call the trend, home designers and builders all over the Chicago area are returning to the design benefits and cost advantages of the four-corner house.
Homes with four right angles, such as American four-squares, bungalows, colonials and Georgians, were popular for decades.
The 1980s, however, brought a new emphasis on style and design, with protruding rooms with bump-outs and other angles jutting from homes.
But that was before land and home building costs made spatial efficiency a necessity, not a luxury.
What do four corners have to do with efficiency?
Plenty, says Christopher Shaxted, executive vice-president of Hoffman Estates-based Lakewood Homes, which like other Chicago-area new home builders has been refocusing on the four-corner house.
“Every time you create an additional corner, there’s more cost involved,” Shaxted noted. “There are complications that go along with that corner. More time spent framing, all the way up to the roof system, which requires more engineering and labor to work through the details.”
Buyers don’t typically spend a lot of time admiring an exterior bump-out or extra corner, he adde:.
“So if you say I can create a little bump-out here, and that will cost you an additional $1,500, but there will be no additional usable space, will he go for that? The answer is no. The whole goal here is to create value in the customer’s mind. It starts at the corners of the house in simplicity of design, and goes throughout the home.”
For instance, he said, with garages increasingly becoming three-car models, builders are placing bedrooms above garages in space not formerly used.
That makes second floors larger than before. And that extra space in turn allows larger secondary bedrooms as well a new phenomenon, the second-floor family room or kids room.
What’s true among production builders may be even truer among custom builders of infill homes constructed on tight lots.
Among them is C. George Builders in Glen Ellyn, which won a 2002 “Streetscape Compatibility Award” from Glen Ellyn’s Historic Preservation Commission for an infill home that blended seamlessly with the vintage structures nearby.
President George Scigousky says there are myriad design benefits associated with a simple, four-cornered design.
“There’s a lot of equality from a design perspective. You’ve got a lot of things in balance. Windows are centered in rooms; you have balanced spaces on either side of hallways.”
Though many four-corner homes are rectangular, houses with square or nearly square footprints are the most efficient.
Squaring a home minimizes the linear feet of exterior wall that builders have to construct, said Frank Johnson, in-house architect with Smykal Associates, a Wheaton company building in Channahon, Oswego and Minooka.
For instance, a 40-by-40-foot home offers 1,600 square feet of living space and 160 linear feet of exterior wall. By contrast, a hypothetical 20-by-80-foot house, though admittedly impractical, would require 200 linear feet of wall without creating one additional square foot of livable space, Johnson said.
A square or nearly square home also allows design flexibility inside, Scigousky noted.
“When you start chopping up a square, you wind up with a lot of squares inside that,” he said. “So it’s very economical space. Take a 30-by-30-foot square, divide it and you can get four 15-by-15 square rooms. There’s really no wasted space.”
Simple four-corner houses may sound boring, but they don’t have to be.
Bill Gronow, vice-president and partner at South Barrington’s Kennedy Builders, reports designers and builders can spice up such a design, starting with secondary rooflines.
“You break up that long gable with a secondary gable, or with hips, or with eyebrows over windows,” he said. “You can also box out a little bit by popping out a window element to give it some relief. And then, of course, porches on the first floor add another dimension or relief to that exterior, front elevation.”
Emilio Miniscalco, president of St. Charles-based Miniscalco Architects Ltd., which offers custom, semi-custom and production home designs, said minimizing bends and angles in the exterior of homes frees up resources that can be put to better use on exterior styling.
“We utilize cantilevered elements like bay windows, box windows, window seats,” Miniscalco said. “A lot of times we’ll use front porches. The efficiency in building the house allows us to add architectural interest to the home using elements like porches and trim details.”
Plenty of examples of the new four-corner house can be found around the Chicago area. For instance, at Kennedy Fields of Leighlinbridge in Manhattan, Kennedy Homes provides a product line that runs from 2,000 to 3,530 square feet, includes three to five bedrooms, 2 1/2 to four baths and “bonus” recreation space upstairs that can be converted into another bedroom or a home office. Prices start at $189,900.
The abundant interior space is a testament to simple design, Gronow reported.
“The simple design stems from the fact it’s a box,” he said. “It’s a rectangle with as few bump-outs as possible. That’s a key element, in keeping the core of the house as rectangular as possible.”
Lakewood Homes is offering the Manchester floor plan, a two-story design with simple rectangular footprint, at several of its communities. The simplicity of the plan pays off inside, where buyers get four bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, living room, dining room, first and second-floor family rooms, first-floor den, basement and attached three-car garage.
Measuring 2,994 square feet, the Manchester sells in Bartlett’s Lakewood Mills for $338,990, in Round Lake’s Lakewood Grove for $289,990 and in Plano’s Lakewood Springs for $218,990.
Mark and Tammy Lerner, both 42, moved with their two young sons into the Manchester model at Lakewood Grove in Round Lake in April. The efficiency of the exterior design wasn’t the first thing either of the Lerners noticed.
“To tell you the truth,” Mark said, “before you mentioned it, I didn’t really think of it as a four-corner house.”
But like most buyers of four-corner designs, they found an abundance of usable living area.
“Everyone who comes in the house talks about how spacious it is,” Mark said. “When you go upstairs, you think it’s going to be tight but it’s not. It’s large … It’s really a nice set-up. I can afford a house here that’s bigger than anything I ever thought I’d have.”
Elsewhere, Buffalo Grove-based KB Home’s “All-American Series,” on display at Horizons in WhiteCaps in Kenosha, fits the four-corner description perfectly.
Straightforward designs like the 2,012-square-foot Grant and 2,500-square-foot Franklin models provide first-floor living room, dining room, kitchen, family room and den, with four bedrooms and two baths upstairs. The floor plans’ efficiencies make the All-American Series ideal for many first-time buyers, because they are similar to plans in much larger homes, said sales director Patt Mohapp. The homes are priced from the mid-$190,000s to the $280,000s.
Another prime example of efficient, four-cornered design is AMG Homes’ Timberland II model at Kylyn’s Ridge in Yorkville. Priced at $269,900, the four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath design has a two-car garage and full basement. Yorkville-based AMG Homes, which is marketing new home communities in both Yorkville and Hampshire, has made a reputation on building efficiently designed houses that maximize living space, even within smaller footprints.
Buyers notice not four corners but plenty of living space, said director of sales Jennifer Lawrence. They want “less of the showy items, and more practicality of living,” she noted.
