The Online Photographer

If you like interior photography, or just interiors, Zillow is an historically unique opportunity to sneak a peek into houses everywhere.

Just wondering...does your aesthetic sense extend to a lot of things in the world? I'm pretty convinced that most human beings don't think or feel about the world in this way. How things look—visual priority, you might call it—a sense of the aesthetic style of the world of appearances—just doesn't enter into their perceptions. I think it was either Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton who said that middle Americans were the most aesthetically dead human beings in the history of the world, or words to that effect.

But maybe the habit of looking at the world through an aesthetic filter is itself disreputable, I don't know. It does make you judgemental. It's possible that my reflexive tendency to look at the world through this prism is undesirable or misplaced. It certainly seems unfair to look at people this way, although I still do sometimes (we all do, albeit for different reasons. Scott Schuman certainly does. He's one of a small number of photographers who photographs "found" fashion on the street). I've had to train myself to overlook peoples' outward appearances to better see their humanity underneath. I try to be nice to all kinds of people. As if we are all equal, even though it's human nature to strive to pretend we're not.

And I myself don't dress well, speaking of Scott Schuman. Anyone could easily find fault with my appearance.

Trees and houses
But with some things it seems harmless enough. When I was a kid I actually had a mental list of beautiful trees that I had seen in my peregrinations. That might sound weird to say out loud. But I liked trees and I admired ones that were picturesque. Houses are easy to evaluate in aesthetic terms, because they are "presented" to the world by their outward appearance—realtors call it "curb appeal"—and you're not insulting anyone directly if you judge a house while driving by.

The housing stock in America generally is a complete disaster. It's a contemporary American characteristic that we select people who have an innately good design sense, train them to be architects, and then save money by not hiring them to design our houses. Not one house in a hundred was actually designed by an architect for a particular site or neighborhood. It was plucked from a catalog or concocted by a builder. We generally let builders design our houses—which of course results in houses that are calculated to be a.) salable to lowest-common-denominator tastes, and b.) easy and cheap to build. Or simply designed by someone who doesn't have a lot of aptitude or talent for design. That's how we get monstrosities like the ones found at sites like McMansion Hell. The top example on that site right now looks like a deliberate parody. Truly awful. Alarmingly awful. Dispiritingly so. Honestly, go look at that thing—check out the interior; it seriously wouldn't be any worse if it were drawn for an episode of The Simpsons.

The bigger the house, the harder it is to design well. But even garden-variety houses can be really bad. Just poking around on Zillow, it's unfortunately far easier to find ugly houses than attractive ones. But even acknowledging that I can be judgemental in this regard, and that it might not be fair to look for taste and beauty everywhere, this house took me aback:

This might be the worst one-box house I've ever seen. How can you screw up a plain box so spectacularly? Here's a rear view:

I just love that misbegotten little twist of downspout coming from the lower edge of the "mansard roof." That gutter placement is hilarious.

One of the funny things about this is that the real estate listing for this house features 15 photographs of the exterior, including seven of the front of the house. Like it was something to savor. The interior is actually pretty decent. But I'd be embarrassed to live there.

You can find an endless supply of very odd things about houses on the internet, and they always entertain me. Just a few examples and I'll stop:

Someone really didn't think things through here. I even wonder if maybe this isn't a Photoshop joke.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they used to say in New England.

What I like about this one is not so much the odd position of the loo, which is weird enough, but the "design" of those steps. Seriously, contemplate those for a minute. Truly postmodern. Someone really got carried away with that.

Passive Design Solutions
And just as an antidote to all the above, here's an example of a good design: Juniper Mountain is a passive house design from Canada's Passive Design Solutions. This house would be low maintenance and have very low energy costs, and it has enough room without being too large. I don't think it has enough storage space for a three-bedroom house, unless it's a vacation home. It would be luxurious as a house for a couple or a single person with one guest room. And I don't approve of the open kitchen (I like closed kitchen plans), but other than that, it's quite nice in my opinion. 

My advice, if you ever build a house: utilize the services of a good architect who specializes in residential design, even if it's a very simple house, and hire an experienced professional contractor. And don't get fancy.

Bad design, like entropy, never rests.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

MarkB: "You just like that passive house design (Juniper Mountain) because they put a pool table on the plan.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: You got me.  :-)

Bridget Dawson: "Oh my gosh...your timing of this is just right for my husband and I. We are laughing hysterically as we read this. We've been looking for a house in Florida, and we ignore 95% of what comes along because they are all so unattractive. No personality. Why does this entire state look like a giant suburb? Florida was charming in the 1970s, but now it's nothing more than the world's largest parking lot! Everywhere! And it's what's going on inside all these cloned houses that really aggravates us. White on white, with white, in white. Another ugly kitchen with ugly spotted granite countertops, ugly colorless stainless steel appliances, refrigerators the size of a walk-in closet, white cabinets to the ceiling that no one can reach...why does everyone want their kitchen to look like everyone else's? And don't even get us started on the lousy photographs...."

David Maxwell: "You are probably not much into Twitter, but an account on there called Zillow Gone Wild is a lot of fun."

Sebastian Broll: "The loo made my...not my day, but at least my pre-breakfast morning. Cheers from a usually badly-dressed person."

Colin: "Another source of both delight and distress is Zillow Gone Wild."

s.wolters: "Belgium has a reputation when it comes to ugly houses. Several photographers had projects about it and even accused each other of plagiarism in court. There are books and even organized tours, but if you want a quick impression about the scale and the looks of it just google images of Ugly Belgian Houses or try this link. Another is this one."

Mike replies: There's a Middle Eastern country—I think it might be Turkey, sorry if I'm wrong—that has a tax loophole for unfinished houses, which has resulted in countless houses being perpetually half-finished. A different but not dissimilar problem. Of course America sometimes has the opposite problem of Belgium's—too many rules rather than too few, not because of government but in private developments with strict rules on the look, size, color, and even landscaping of every house. I looked at a house in such a development where I wasn't allowed to fence my backyard. Land of the Free?!

I almost bought a lot in a development in Wisconsin until I discovered that I could not legally build a house as small as the one I wanted. Nor was I allowed to build a one-story design. They all had to be 2,500 square feet minimum, two stories, and either beige or light gray in color. One renegade had painted his house pale yellow, no doubt raising the ire and the emnity of the condo association.

jeremy t: "Here is a nice essay that discusses why houses in Belgium are often ugly. There is also a great book by Hannes Coudenys with photographs of some fine examples."

[Ed. note: See both ASW's and Henning's comments in the Comments section. Both are a bit too long to feature, but both are good and illuminate different important aspects of the subject.]

Jim H: "Where I live now (Santa Monica—near Los Angeles) is both ground zero for showing how money, wretched excess and custom homes exemplify bad taste, and also a showcase for some of the best residential architects ever—Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and even Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. About 10 years ago, having house tours of these famous houses was a big thing, so we got to visit many of these houses and buildings by famous architects.

"You can waste a lot of time in my pages on these tours. I recommend the MAK House Tour first which ends with a visit to Julius Schulman's home shortly after his death while it was being cleared out for sale. Schulman was probably the most famous architectural photographer of all time. We met him once at a tour of the FLW Ennis-Brown house (linked to) and heard him talk about all the famous places he photographed.

"All of these pages are more than a decade old. Some of these photos are from earlier digital photos and some film—the 'Oak Park - 1971' pictures are scans from some Tri-X negatives we shot in a visit to the FLW homes in Oak Park where we joined a college class getting a private tour—long before organized tours. Most of the digital was taken with an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera with the 9–18mm zoom—really nice for architecture."

Yonatan Katznelson: "It seems to me that someone took the euphemism 'throne room' a bit too seriously in that last picture."

John Camp: "Because I've had an odd series of jobs and moves, and because I was lucky enough to get into a house when I was young, I've owned 11 houses in an already long life. I have worked with different architects specializing in residential work on two different homes and both made serious errors that were either expensive to fix or unfixable.

"The most annoying and potentially dangerous error over the longterm was a kind of eyebrow shelter over a front stoop that actually drained onto the stoop—this in Minnesota, which has an extended freeze-thaw cycle in both late autumn and early spring. For two months a year, the stoop was an unpredictable skating rink. The error was unfixable without essentially disassembling the house and rebuilding the entire front. On the other hand, it looked kinda nice, if you weren't lying on your back in the driveway with a broken spine.

"My advice to anyone working with an architect—you're probably smarter than he/she is, and you probably know more about your building site. Question everything, and stay on top of everything. Demand current and specific billing. Be especially aware of climate problems (like the freeze-thaw cycle, or flat-roof sections in areas with lots of snow, or large north-facing windows in cold climates.) Do not sign the standard AIA (American Institute of Architects) contract. Hire a lawyer to write the contract with the architect, and if the architect doesn't like that, find another architect. This will save you lots of money. (The 'standard' AIA contract is bullshit; it protects no one but the architect, and sets up a system that positively encourages the architect to spend as much money on the project as is possible.) Do not allow the architect to order anything from Europe. Anything that you can get from Europe is also made or available here. If you insist on Carrara marble...well, that's unfixable.)

"I could go on, but won't, except for one last suggestion: Buy an existing house that you find financially and aesthetically acceptable, and inspect the hell out of it so you know not only what needs to be fixed, but what you might want to change in the future.

"As for the commenter above with the unfinished wet basement, that can be fixed, without too much cost. And you can finish the basement simply and by yourself. Unless you live in a remote area, there are classes that will help you finish it. I've actually done all this—I've even installed a second bathroom on my own, and I'm not renowned as a handyman."