Blast from the past

Residential Architect, August, 2002 by Stan Wellborn

I picked up an old copy of residential architect (March 2001) at my health club in Washington a few weeks ago and found the magazine quite interesting--in part because my wife and I are in the process of working with an architect to build a second home in southern Colorado.

I was struck by the editorial you wrote in that issue ("The Not So Ugly House," page 13) about small vs. large vs. ugly home design. I too have read Sarah Susanka's books, Tracy Kidder's book, and architectural magazines, with an eye toward designing a smaller house with distinctive detail and real livability.

Our home in Washington has about 2,500 square feet, where three kids were reared. We'd like our second home to be no larger than 2,000 square feet, but we have had a tough time persuading our architect to follow suit. The trend, inevitably, seems to be toward building bigger and grander. We finally limited the size by giving an absolute top limit on what we would spend, and we insisted that floor space should come second to good and innovative construction.

In any event, I enjoyed your column for the food for thought it provided. I look forward to seeing future issues of your magazine.

Stan Wellborn by e-mail