Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell!
I want to start out by saying I was very privileged to grow up in an old house (which I define as pre-1940s) and I innately appreciate, and am drawn to, old house qualities.
I do believe old houses (in general) are better than new houses (in general), but—hopefully this could go without saying—people who live in old houses are of course not better than people who live in new houses, and buying an old house is not somehow a better choice than buying a new house. And some people don’t even like old houses or want to live in one—they can be a real pain! All houses, apartments, condos, houseboats, and so on can be happy homes.
Just wanted to make that absolutely clear. Plus, when I say old is better, I mean old. 90+ years old at this point. Those are pretty darn rare.
Houses started becoming worse around the 1940s and immediately postwar, before most of us reading this were born. Most of the population booms in American cities happened after that period, precipitating the need for tons of new houses. That means post-1940s (aka, new) houses make up most of the housing inventory in America. Some cities barely have anything built before 1940 in the housing inventory—the farther west you go in America, the newer everything is.
Homeowners are consumers of the housing market—choosing from the options available to them within their budget. I count myself among them; when the time comes for my husband and I to buy, we very well might choose a new house. But homeowners don’t create the market; we have no control over the options we can choose from.
So what are the qualities of an old house that make it better? What do we mean when we say “charm,” or “coziness” or “character?” These qualities are not simply an ineffable je ne sais quoi, but very tangible specifications that are possible to replicate. The things that make an old house charming, pleasing to the eye, and a good container for human private life can actually be broken down into dimensions, proportions, materials, angles, etc., that were once executed by knowledgeable builders, guided by knowledgeable architects.
The classic old house qualities
(Thanks to this Reddit thread for help coming up with this list):
Symmetry for windows, doors, and chimneys—and not just on the front “curb appeal” side
Very simple footprint: straight lines and right angles, no odd wall popouts
Size usually between 1,200 and 1,800 square feet
Purposeful room sizes and ceiling heights
Thick, sturdy walls that give you a sense of security—it’s not going to blow over in a high wind
Brick, wood, stone, adobe, and metal materials—no vinyl, no asphalt, no PVC
High enough roof pitches to shed snow, at least in cold/wet climates
Efficient layouts with rooms separated by doors or framed doorways
Bedrooms in corners, with windows on two sides to create a cross-breeze (that was the A/C)
Wood millwork on baseboards, around doors and windows, on ceiling
Small, but cedar-lined, closets
Built-in bookshelves, china cabinets, linen closets
A front hall closet (practical!)
1 - 1.5 bathrooms, 2.5 max
Small, isolated kitchens, often in the back of the house
Plaster walls
Wood floors
Often, detached garage or no garage
Often, a sunroom and/or mudroom
What else would you add?
None of this is rocket science. We like bigger closets and bigger, more central kitchens these days, but otherwise…? The other qualities are very appealing and very achievable.
Now, what makes new houses just feel a little “off” in that ineffable way that old houses just feel “right”?
Some of the main problems with new houses
Full credit to this post on The Map is Mostly Water substack:
They seem designed primarily to maximize one thing: the square-footage number that will be on the listing when it’s sold. Maximizing for this not only comes at the cost of everything else on the budget, it also leads to ridiculous room designs, random chasms, and dead space. An eye towards making the best sale does not create the best living space.
Carpet has replaced wood flooring. $1/sqft tile (or linoleum) has replaced the rest. Very cheap looking tile fills even expensive homes.
Hardware is of poor quality, even in half-million-dollar-plus homes. (Ed note: Make that million+ dollar homes.) Cheap and ugly faucets, light fixtures, doorknobs, and paper-thin doors dominate. While somewhat understandable in the least expensive new construction, it’s surprising to me to find these things in more expensive homes.
While many modest old homes have low ceilings, you’ll still find ceilings both unnervingly too low and way too high in modern homes, such as sudden 2-story living rooms, or 2-story “lawyer foyer” entryways. They exist out of all proportion with the rest of the house.
Availability of electric light has allowed builders to ignore the sun. They do this to such an extent that some modern homes need the lights turned on at almost all times, for example, to use a kitchen in the morning at breakfast. Many rooms have few or only one window, while hallways often have none at all. Often windows (or the lack thereof) offer neither good light, nor a view, nor provide a pretty façade from the outside.
“Forced air” duct heating and cooling has allowed builders to ignore window-based ventilation. Modern homes have almost no concept of airflow outside of these systems. Even in houses with central air systems, rooms get too hot, or too cold, and people living in the houses sometimes must install window AC units (in houses that already have central air!) or keep windows open in the winter to moderate these failures.
Homes are not built by people intending to live in them. Instead, they are built by builders, who mostly want to flash-form “units” —as many as possible, as fast as possible, out of sticks and drywall. Everything from sunlight to cabinet pulls becomes not just an afterthought, but a non thought.
The whole post is really worth a read.
The magic of an old house doesn’t lie in its being custom-designed, inefficient to build, and impossible to replicate. Last week I wrote about the inherent value in doing things the hard way. But I’m not against a purposeful shortcut. I, too, use store-bought puff pastry because it’s way too hard to make at home. And as it turns out, “cookie cutter” houses were not a new concept in the 1980s and 90s.
The Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan was making “readi-cut” homes as early as 1906. The houses are really cute as well as being practical and efficient. These were cheap homes for working families, yet they had all the old house qualities that make old houses better (except, perhaps, the super thick walls).
(FWIW, an Aladdin home in 1930 cost between $374 for a very modest 324 sq ft home—the size of a studio apartment I once lived in—and $1,225 for about a 1,400 sq ft home. That’s between about $7,000 for the smallest and $23,000 for the largest, in today’s money. Sigh. These houses were shipped to you as a kit, and prices included freight. I believe the homeowner was responsible for the costs of labor.)
Aladdin Homes’ motto is “Sold by the Golden Rule.” You know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They treated their customers as themselves—designed and built the kind of houses they would like to live in.
Not anymore. Per the above bulleted list, today’s homes are not built by people intending to live in them. And that’s making them progressively worse.
One reason, as Brent Hull, master builder and prolific educator on classical architecture says, is that “the architects have abandoned residential construction.”
Residential buildings are no longer actually designed, with a uniform design philosophy and following classical architectural language such as the golden ratio. They are just stuck together, with a mish-mash of architectural styles and materials that aren’t unified by any real reason besides, I guess, what’s cheapest. That’s because the builders control “design” of residential buildings.
So, we’ve put the people in charge of design who are neither motivated by, nor educated in, design for practical livability, and are instead 100% motivated by maximizing profit. What could go wrong for the consumer???
And this thing about new houses being built to maximize the square footage listed on the sale… that is so real, and so annoying. Because after a certain point, is more space really better? Or does better use of space actually give you more? More practicality, more human scale, more coziness, more closeness as a family?
I wish I could tie up these thoughts with a neat bow, but I don’t have that for you today. Housing is a messy challenge! There’s certainly a housing crisis in Boston where I live, and in many other American cities as well. We need more affordable homes, fast, as Millennials expand our families and grow out of our apartments and starter homes. And the Zoomers are hot on our heels. We can’t always do things the hard way. Materials, labor, and land are expensive.
And yet… I can’t help but wonder how hard it would be to copy-paste some cute early 20th century home designs into some 2024 suburbs? I would live in any of the houses in the Aladdin Company catalogue. And I’d spring for the garage add-on… those are really cute, too. Design for practical livability! It’s a wonderful thing.
If you’ve read this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
xx Jane
P.S. I hid this article in a hyperlink at the beginning, but read "The 10 Circles of McMansion Hell" by Kate Wagner. She nails it.
I couldn’t agree more. We just moved into a 1920s bungalow, so this has been on my mind a lot.