There have been more than 20 New American Home show houses since 1984, when the honchos at the National Association of Home Builders decided that this might be the most efficient way to showcase trends and new products at its annual gathering.
But unless you are directly involved in their production, you quickly forget what made each show house special at the time.
After all, much of that is inside the walls or is usually too expensive or off-the-wall to find its way into what the typical buyer purchases.
W.T. “Bill” Nolan, co-chairman of the NAHB task force that comes up with the New American Home each year, doesn’t find such short-term memory that surprising.
Nolan, who began building houses in Orlando 25 years ago after a similar career in the Philadelphia suburbs, tends to remember the show houses that didn’t sell quickly.
“We had one house, the one built for the 1999 show in Dallas, that was way overpriced for its market,” he said.
“I recall that the builder kept it off the market for two years, using it as a marketing tool, until the prices caught up and he was able to sell it.”
Another show house, built about 20 years ago, “had bleachers instead of seating in the living room,” Nolan said. “It was designed to be minimalist, but unless you could find an NBA team to use it, features such as this are just too cutesy for the average buyer.”
Price isn’t a problem with this year’s showhouse. Situated on Millionaires’ Row in Orlando’s very expensive Baldwin Park neighborhood, the house is under contract for $2.55 million, Nolan said.
The buyer is an unidentified Orlando builder. Recently married, he and his wife are bringing five children from previous marriages to the 9,036-square-foot, Mediterranean-style dwelling.
“If they decide they want the furnishings, the price will go up to $3 million,” Nolan said.
The first New American Home, built in Houston, sold for $80,000. The increase in prices since 1984 has been consistent, and the 2005 house commanded the highest price to date.
What makes this house special or new?
According to the builder, Kim Goehring of Goehring & Morgan Construction Inc. of Orlando, it’s the $140,000 infinity-edge pool, which has a disappearing perimeter edge instead of the traditional lip, creating the illusion that the water is flowing onto the surrounding deck.
The water that flows over the edge is recirculated in a holding tank for constant reuse.
“Spending $140,000 for a pool in a $2.5 million Florida house isn’t all that unusual,” Goehring said.
The show house’s elevator, part of the plan to make it handicapped-accessible, is another noteworthy feature.
Home elevators are not new, of course.
Toll Bros., the luxury-home builder in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., has offered them as options to its upper-end buyers for several years.
Including such a feature, Nolan said, highlights the attention being paid to what’s known in the real estate industry as “aging in place” — the desire of many homeowners to stay in their homes as they grow older.
Taking note of another emerging trend is the 2005 New American Home’s finished garage.
It’s been years since garages were used exclusively for cars, and now they’re used primarily as storage space.
The idea here, architect Ed Binkley said, is to make the garage living and entertaining space, not just a place to toss what doesn’t fit elsewhere.
“Even production builders are offering two-car garages as finished space for a party room,” said Binkley, of Bloodgood Sharp Buster Architects & Planners’ Oviedo, Fla., office.
“This one has sliding glass doors that lead from the garage to the pool area, but even in colder areas, the garages are being insulated, heated and air-conditioned.”
In Florida and other places where basements aren’t standard new-home fare, garages are an obvious choice for additional living space.
One of the goals of this show house’s designers was to make it energy-efficient.
They took a “systems approach,” combining insulation and construction techniques with new technologies to achieve what Nolan and Goehring say will be a 47 percent reduction in heating and cooling costs and a 64 percent drop in water-heating expense compared with typical houses of similar size in the same climate.
The house has solar thermal panels for water heating, four high-efficiency heat pumps, sealed and insulated ductwork, an insulated and unvented attic and sprayed insulation in all the cavities on the second floor, as well as energy-efficient windows and doors.
“All of this added $25,000 to the construction costs of the house,” Nolan said. “We expect the payback to the homeowner to take four or five years. That should be the rule of thumb on energy-efficient construction — no more than five years, since people tend to live in their houses an average of seven years.”
The construction costs for this house, not including land, average about $300 a square foot, well in the ballpark for Baldwin Park, which is often called the “Beverly Hills of Orlando.”
Yet what makes this year’s New American Home unique isn’t its bells and whistles but its durability.
During last year’s destructive hurricane season, the show house — built to residential construction codes adopted after Hurricane Andrew ripped through South Florida in 1992 — withstood everything the storms were able to throw at it.
There were a couple of minor exceptions: Two shingles blew off the roof, and the high winds took out one of the windows.
“All the windows are high-impact, designed to withstand sustained winds of 130 mph,” Goehring said. “Hurricane Charley took one of the upstairs windows out of the sash and blew it 60 feet from the house.”
It didn’t break, though.
“We reinstalled the same window,” Goehring said.
And the two shingles?
“They were the last two installed on the roof as Charley was approaching,” he said. “We suppose they forgot to glue and nail them down.”
