1924 Craftsman Style Bungalow (click to enlarge)
A previous post,
We Must Be Nuts, told the story of a retirement dream -- to find a neglected urban home of historical significance and preserve and conserve its historical contribution to the neighborhood while sustainably making it into our retirement green dream home. After 44 years of marriage we yearn for a home during our retirement that will not only sustainably keep and shelter us together but that also will continue to do so for whichever of us may someday carry on without the other, and for generations of other families to come after that. A dream like this is a chance, if realized, to leave a tangible and lasting legacy.
Go out into the tall grass to find out about the adventure this dream has set us off on since the initial post. Learn our unprecedented-in-the-U.S. plans (so far as I can tell) for realizing both our green and historical preservation dreams and see an update of our initial progress.
The Chance for a Significant Historic Preservation
The pictures show a 1 and 1/2, all brick, with full basement, Craftsman Style Bungalow, that has been listed as a contributing structure to a nationally registered historic preservation district.
The history of this bungalow tells a rich and evocative story. The house represents a very particular and special era in American life when an emerging middle class became stronger than ever before and our forebears were looking for a new style of living.
The Victorian excesses in design and decor that dominated urban life in the late 19th Century provoked an artistic backlash that had swept through Western culture in movements like Art Nouveau in France, The Secession in Vienna, Style Moderne in Russia, and Gaudi in Spain. In the English speaking World, the backlash found expression in the Arts & Crafts Movement, a thread of which emerged in the United States as Craftsman, Prairie and Mission Styles, threads that themselves sometimes intertwined. One of the most lasting legacies left by these movements on the American landscape is the Craftsman Style Bungalow which graces certain sections of many American cities and towns.
The Craftsman Style Bungalow reflects the artistic recoil against those Victorian excesses which
included "useless" ornamentation and gingerbread, living with a mish-mash of inconsistent patterns and style and copying "foreign" styles. The primary inspiration for the Craftsman style was to look to nature, local materials, local (nationalist or native) building traditions and to design and construct after the manner of honest craft traditions: iron and copper blacksmithing, pottery, coarse weaving and rough hewn materials. One problem in the United States was the short history; there was no medieval architecture or Cotswald cottage to return to. No matter, there were colonial log cabins, the Spanish missions of the Southwest, and even Native American rugs and pottery.
The result of these newer influences was new thinking about homes, the people occupying them and how they lived.
As one writer noted:
Striving for "honesty of design" is the hallmark of the Craftsman and Craftsman-style home.
Some of the first true Craftsman homes, like the Gamble House by Greene & Greene, were built in California. The open floor plan and earth-hugging horizontal profile was ideally suited for California's mild year-round climate. The design was heavily influenced by the architecture of the Spanish mission buildings and the Japanese aesthetic that was seen everywhere in the first decades of the 20th century.
The magic of the Craftsman-style home was contagious. Homes designed by architectural leaders like the Greene brothers were huge, expensive, and well-appointed with every amenity. At the same time, plans for the rustic or "artistic" home were well within reach of those with more modest pretensions.
Popularizing the style was largely the work of the indefatigable writers like Henry Wilson and Gustav Stickley. Wilson popularized the Craftsman bungalow style on the West Coast through his writings and book, aptly named The Bungalow Book. Stickley, using his magazine The Craftsman to write about all things Arts & Crafts, offered a new house plan in every issue.
During the Roaring Twenties, the growing American middle class started to grow again, after the disruptions of the Great War. Toward the ends of some of America's new electric street car lines there was still vacant land where some of America's first suburbs sprang up inside the city, itself, where new homes could be built farther from the reeking squalor that characterized much of urban life at that time. The movements reacting to the Victorian Era didn't merely reflect matters of taste or fashion. American designers were influenced by the philosophies such as the City Beautiful movement and intentionally designed neighborhoods to mix different economic classes together by interspersing single and multifamily housing with small businesses serving local needs. Local craftsmanship held favor over industrial produced materials and furnishings for these homes. This design movement, largely snuffed out by the Great Depression after 1929, aimed to sustain American families, without servants, but in a level of comfort that only upper classes had enjoyed, by and large, just a generation before. The typical Craftsman Bungalow provided a home designed with local and natural materials, often situated to fit in naturally with the land occupied.
The bungalow featured at the top of this post occupies land that, until immediately prior to its development in the 1920's, was owned by a trust created by the estate of one of the city's greatest philanthropists. The wealthy 19th Century merchant had endowed a 285 acre park nearby that opened in 1872 and his trust maintained an extensive botanical garden for the benefit and use of the public. He devoted much of his philanthropy to the study and display of the natural world, particularly plants and trees. When his trust sold off the land now occupied by the bungalow to raise money for the botanical gardens, it carefully controlled the type of development in the nearby land, to maintain harmony in the urban spaces around the gardens and the park. The benefactor's magnificent, Antebellum, Italianate mansion sits just 2500 feet from the Craftsman Bungalow pictured.
The Plan
Faithfully restore the exterior while gutting and redesigning the entire interior to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, building the floor plan of our dreams and living happily ever after, after winning every available award for green design, building and historical preservation.
It isn't that long ago that I would have found the preceding sentence incomprehensible. Right away, I would have asked, What is LEED Platinum Certification? LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It is a program of the United States Green Building Council.
LEED is the way that everybody will be pressured to build and operate buildings twenty years from now. For now, it is the highest building standard available for this kind of project in the USA and any of the four LEED certifications represents scientific testing, modeling and verification that the building will perform up to the environmental claims made for it. A LEED certification application and assessment is complex and expensive, adding many tasks to any construction project.
For this project, Platinum certification will require a lot more than some energy efficient windows, updated insulation and Energy Star appliances, heating and cooling. We will need grey water recycling, rain water harvesting, automated, sun-following shades to maximize winter heating and minimize Summer solar gain, energy recovery ventilation, zoned multi-stage furnace and a great deal more. We may add photovoltaic if it can be done unobtrusively, without breaking the historic streetscape. We are aiming for a home three or more times more efficient than the average American home, and more than twice as efficient as the greenest home that the best building codes in America would require today.
This is how building must be done in the future on a widespread basis, but it has to start somewhere. So far as I can discern on the internet, it does not appear that a LEED Platinum Certification has been done for an authentic Craftsman Bungalow. This bungalow is typical of many beautiful, but abused and neglected homes nearby and elsewhere in the city. Renovations, remodeling and rehabilitation of these and other styles of homes in the historic preservation district continue at an accelerating pace, but with little more than marketing spin and lip service to sustainability issues regarding these homes. If no one else wants to step up and show builders how to do it right, we will.
Progress Update
This bungalow had been off the market under contract when we first started scouting this neighborhood in October, but came back on when the deal fell through. We found out about the listing on Election day. Since then, I have had the property inspected by a LEED certified builder who took the photos shown in the post; I had a consultant prepare walk through videos (I live in another city and haven't been to the property in person, yet) and prepare a floor plan; and I had three phone conferences and a meeting with bankers, to be followed by an appointment Monday morning to get a commitment from a banker for rehabilitation financing for the project. I have also signed up a buyer's real estate agent. We hope to put a bid on the house by Wednesday.
Please cross your fingers for us. We will probably be bidding against some of the usual suspect developers who sneer at building for sustainability.
Mon Nov 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM PT: Update: I have the banker's commitment letter to finance the rehab. We are scheduled to fly in tomorrow morning to see the property in person for the first time and confirm our decision, whereupon we will buy it and head for an initial design conference with our builder. The greatest terror now is having someone jump in ahead of us. Please send all available good karma this way. Thanks. LOY