Inside The New American Home

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And that multidimensional role is changing what a house looks like inside. The compartmentalized shelter with separate rooms for preparing food, eating, entertaining and watching television has been steadily giving way to an abode made up of larger, flexible living areas. So something had to give, and it has: the formal living and dining rooms. "Formals are dead," says Michael Herzog, a regional vice president with Centex Corp., one of the nation's largest homebuilders. Centex is designing formal-free homes, something most builders wouldn't even consider a couple of years ago. "There's a whole different thought process going into the home today," says Stephen Peake, a Centex architect. Now "there's a lot of focus on flexible use of space." And it's not confined to fancy homes. Such features as media rooms and home offices can be found in many of the 209 homes ranging in price from $130,000 to $180,000 that Centex is building in the fast-growing Dallas suburb of McKinney. Another surprise: Centex's designs are feng shui friendly. The Oriental philosophy of maximizing the chi, or energy, of a building through its design is a must for Asian buyers, and it is crossing into the Western mainstream.

Simply put, we don't want our houses to suggest English cottages anymore. Interior walls are disappearing. Volume has replaced coziness, from double-height entryways to oversize garages. It's a concept embraced by urbanites who have abandoned their shoebox-size apartments for the wide-open spaces of lofts reclaimed from 100-year-old factory buildings. With the living room fading, the kitchen has become the family gathering place, and it's being packed with multiple sinks and Department of Defense--priced ovens. The kitchen can't be contained anymore, so it blends into that large live-eat-play space often called a great room, which connects through glass doors to the outside space, now being treated as an integral part of the design. The idea is to allow family togetherness and personal space at the same time, meaning never having to reach a consensus about what to do together.

Yet the same parents who are intent on creating common areas are just as determined to wall themselves off from their issue in master-bedroom suites the size of apartments. "I have to have this," a client recently told Los Angeles--area contractor Bill Simone. "l'll get a night job if I have to, but my bedroom has to be huge." Don't crowd Mom and Dad, kids, they're boomers. And guess what: the size of your bedrooms is being squeezed so they can have walk-in closets (one each), a bathroom with his-and-hers vanities and a shower cabinet with enough sidewall-to-ceiling showerheads to rinse an suv.

These overachieving homes and the American lust for space have given sprawl a new interior dimension. Even in 2,000-sq.-ft. starter homes, says Peake, consumers are demanding a family room, a master suite and an upstairs game room--known locally as a Texas basement. On the upper end, McMansions built to the lot line and stuffed with media rooms, gyms, home offices and oversize three-car garages can distort the look of a neighborhood and result in exteriors that even their designers find distressing. "People don't seem to care," says New Orleans architect Mark Schroeder. "They want all the house they can possibly have."