The Disappearance of the Cookie Cutter Tract Home By Dena Mentis
Special to iNest Those 'little boxes on the hillside' have gone through an amazing metamorphosis over the past decade or so. It seems the semi-customization of production homes is now the rule rather than the exception to it . Homebuilders, sensing the spending habits and needs of the 'have-it-all-now' generation, are offering more choices than ever before, touting massive in-house interior design centers, no-holds-barred landscape and hardscape options, and architectural choices to homebuyers over which even astute custom home designers may be in denial. Visits to the floors of regional building shows all over America reveal some interesting surprises. Booths for manufacturers of gourmet kitchen appliances, granite suppliers from Spain and Italy showing off mirror-like kitchen and bath countertops, dealers in customized wine cellars, manufacturers of fine leaded-glass entry doors and purveyors of gleaming, jewelry-like bathroom fixtures are everywhere. One begins to realize that these companies are not going to all that trouble to promote their products only to an elite group of custom homebuilders. In most cases they are there to offer their wares in bulk to "production" homebuilders (those entities who produce most of America's neighborhoods) hoping to find their products listed in some homebuyer's design center upgrades list. "Tract" homes in places like Las Vegas, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Miami and points East, can start as high as $850,000 to a cool million, with every bell and whistle customized and upgraded to a homebuyers' content. Some of these pricey production homes are justifiably estate-like, on huge home sites; others are patio and courtyard-styled homes in prestigious urban areas, defying the notion that high prices automatically translate into mansion-like dwellings. The point here is that they are not custom homes. They are, like cars in mass production, made with the same basic chassis with lots and lots of variations on the theme for each model. The industry that created the standardized, stamped-out post-World War II boxes depicted on TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver has turned into a finely-tuned producer of innovative home designs, high-tech convenience products, and niche lifestyle-geared mega-cocoons for the sophisticated new home buyer. The end products now being churned out by the American homebuilder are as unlike their ancestral roots as fax machines are to snail-mail or the Internet is to the telephone. Causes for this phenomenon are naturally governed by a number of variables, including the rapidly changing demographics of new homebuyers, the long-lasting boom economy making "extras" the norm, and the ability of homebuilders to deliver customized packages and manage details better than ever before when building homes. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies estimates that couples without children will be the fastest growing segment of the homebuying population within the first decade of the 21st century. Another revelation indicates that by the end of that ten-year period, single-person households will nearly equal the number of nuclear family varieties. The increased need for nesting, precipitated by the fast-laned pace of modern life, has resulted in home office telecommuting, home entertainment enhancements and the need for more luxurious, private respites from deadlines, profit margins and corporate ladder-climbing. Those increasingly well-heeled buyers who swore that they would someday build their custom dream home are discovering that they may never have the time to find just the right home site, hire contractors, get bids, and see their dreams come to fruition. Instead, they are doing the next best thing; finding the fanciest production home on the most beautiful premium home site they can, and letting the homebuilder worry about watching the house go up -- with all their custom choices ordered at the builder's one-stop design facility. Next time you see a stately, stunning Mediterranean villa, with its rustic-appearing arch-topped entry gate, an enclosed entry patio with slate-like flooring leading you through a house worthy of a spread in Architectural Digest to an elegant backyard pool, you may be surprised to find out that it is not a custom home after all. It just may be another fine product brought to you by the production homebuilders of America. |
