Homes and Hues

How Do You Furnish a 12,700 Square Foot House? Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell found a large home for sale in the Chicago suburbs. This one was built in 2001 at the height of the McMansion craze and it shows. It has a large lot, but that is no reason to build a 12,700 house on it. I mean, there are reasons to build a very large house, like if you have a family of twenty people, but that reasonably means more normal-sized rooms, except for a large dining room. In this case, the rooms are just huge for the sake of being huge. Sure, it has five bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms, but they are all larger than is practical. That means it will be hard to regulate the temperature, especially with super-large windows without blinds or draperies. And where do you find furniture big enough to make it look normal? But that's just the beginning of the details that Wagner points out for us in this home. Not only is her takedown funny, but all her criticisms of McMansions teach us new details about architecture, style, balance, and usability. Most of us could see a home like this and dismiss it for being hard to heat, hard to clean, and too pretentious, but she can explain exactly why big, pretentious, yet cheaply built houses can creep us out. See the latest carnage at McMansion Hell.

Old Police Station Converted into ApartmentsThe town of Dudley in central England has a new police station, so the old one ceased normal use in 2017. The Daily Mail reports that now it’s a different kind of prison—a set of apartments. For £750 ($925 USD) you can have one of the studio apartments, which includes a functional cell inside. The bars are painted grey, which nicely accents the grey floor and grey feeling inside of you.

A Stately Home vs. a Manor HouseYou don't have to read gothic novels to come across the terms "stately home" and "manor house," but if you do read such novels, you see them all the time. If you peruse American real estate listings, you see that some realtors love those phrases but really have no set definitions of them. So what do they really mean? The terms come from Britain, where homes go back a long way, and the aristocracy once had the means to build their houses big, beautiful, and sturdy enough to outlive them all. Although the definitions can change over time with changing circumstances, the stately home is different from the manor house in era, architecture, and usage. Number One London gives us four criteria for each, but since they are qualified with "mostly" and "usually," you can assume that if your home fits most of the criteria, you have either a stately home or a manor house. Or probably neither, sadly. There are other terms such as "estate" and "castle" and "country home" and "hall" that the blog will try to define in the future. -via Strange Company(Image credit: Rodhullandemu)

A Big House With Some Really Interesting FeaturesThe internet has taken notice of a home listing that illustrates the difference in home prices by region. This house covers 2,900 square feet and has five bedrooms and five bathrooms on 3.6 acres. It also has a mother-in-law suite and an extra cabin on the grounds. The asking price? $349,000. Really. This home is in Florence, Alabama, where you can get such a house for under a million dollars.

Do You Really, Really Like Aqua? This beachfront house in Hopkins Landing, British Columbia, takes its inspiration from the sea in a big way. Anything that's not blue is green, or somewhere between the two. This is SeaGlass cottage, a 1,289 square foot house with three bedrooms and one bathroom on a little more than an acre.

Lively Front Yards Make Happier NeighborhoodsIt was once a given that your front yard should be small but welcoming, with chairs on the porch to make it easier to talk to people walking by, while the back yard is a private family spot for vegetable gardens, cookouts, and children's toys. Now science is looking into what a front yard has to do with the wellbeing of the people living inside. The hypothesis was that front yards that showed a sense of the resident's personality led to stronger ties among neighborhoods. This sense of personality could be anything from carefully planted flower beds to chairs to flags to holiday decorations to welcome signs. A group of researchers rated homes in Buffalo's Elmwood Village neighborhood by their openness and personality, while a different group contacted the homeowners and had them take a survey on their sense of place. The results show that front yards with personality and a sense of welcome correlated with the residents's contentment, attachment to the neighborhood, and stronger ties with their neighbors. Homes that had fences or hedges in front showed a negative correlation. It makes plenty of sense to me. I met most of the people in my neighborhood just by being outside near the street. Those who were home to see the eclipse ending up all observing it from the same yard. Read about this study and others that corroborate it, plus ways you can make your front yard appear more welcoming at The Conversation.(Image credit: Reading Tom) 