New Construction Windows and Doors

In my last article I defined High Performance Homes; “A High Performance Homes is one that uses sustainable materials, is energy efficient, and uses value added green building practices that causes it to be friendlier to the environment.” In the next few articles we will look at some of the materials and practices used to produce the High Performance Home.

The single biggest heat sink or energy robber in a home is the windows. There are several things to consider here. First and foremost is the total square footage of windows. I’ve never had someone come to me and say “Ronnie build me a home that’s dark and doesn’t have many windows.” Always it goes like this,”I want a home that is light and airy.” Then of course the buyer covers all of the windows with blinds, shades, shutters, drapes, curtains, or heaven forbid foil and seldom opens them due to excessive heat, cold or allergens in the air.

What should you do when designing or selecting a new home? Be realistic. The more windows, the bigger the windows, the bigger the utility bills. If you can, keep your windows down to 15% or so of the exterior wall square footage. Strategically place them to maximize views and limit the direct exposure to the sun. Keep the windows from facing the East or West this will help tremendously. If the windows can be located under a porch or patio so that it has a large overhang protecting them they will perform much better. Also, a larger Cornish overhang will help protect windows as well as shade the exterior walls.

There is an organization that evaluates windows and scores them as to how you can expect them to perform; giving the consumer a chance to be sure they are getting the best product for their money. It is The National Fenestration Rating Council. They subject windows to testing and prescribe how they must be built to obtain a certain score. The scoring speaks to the ability of the windows to block the transmission of heat and ultraviolet rays.

Look for windows that have a low “U-Factor” score. This score indicates the windows’ ability to block heat. A lower score is better. Many builders are using good windows with scores in the .50 range. I like those that are .35 or lower. The next score to look at is “Solar Heat Gain.” Again many windows are being installed with a score around .50. We install those with a score of .32 or lower. Lower is better here as well. Then, the window coverings mentioned before will add additional protection from heat and ultraviolet penetration.

Let me briefly mention doors. Most doors today are made of steel, fiberglass, wood or glass. Nothing insulates like insulation. Hollow doors like steel or fiberglass can be filled with insulation. Wood is not a particularly good insulator and glass is worse. Generally I prefer steel with fiberglass a close second. These doors don’t rot or warp and provide the most security and energy efficiency.

Try to avoid sliding glass doors, after all, what are they but large windows and therefore a big heat sink. And double French doors are hard to keep from leaking heat in or out of your home. If you need that look think of placing a window close to a door or 2 separately cased doors close to each other.

I can still hear the crunch of the gravel driveway under the tires of Grandpa’s Dodge Fury at my grandparents’ home in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. I remember how well the house seemed to fit them and my great-grandmother, who lived with them, and how everything had its place in their home. In that simpler time homes were smaller and less complex, as were the lives of the people those houses sheltered. They were very comfortable in their modest ranch. It wasn’t a custom-built house, but it was unlike any of the others in their neighborhood. It was small, but spacious, and it had character. Knowing my Grandfather, I’m certain he shopped for the best bargain on the street, but he also knew construction and got himself a solid building of quality materials.

When as an Architect, I began to think seriously about home design, I wondered how that house came to be that fit them so well. I like to think that their quiet little homestead was designed and built with care and craftsmanship by someone who had a pretty good idea of the kind of family that might like to live there. Our lives are more varied and complex now, and the design of our homes should support and reflect that.

The opportunities for architectural invention in home design today are limitless – new materials, products, and construction techniques are constantly being introduced, and new technologies are having an impact. Unlike days past when historical styles ruled home design, our options today are wide open. We are free to interpret style, or to create our own to satisfy our aesthetic desires.

But all of these available design tools are too rarely used to create homes that are molded to the lives of their owners. Instead, homebuyers find themselves having to choose from among a few floor plans designed to appeal to a broad market, and then struggling to give it personality and character with just paint, carpet, and furniture. We try to make a house “ours” with features and decorating and never consider that it is the architectural design itself that brings a house to life.

We lose sight of what’s possible and end up with just another house instead of a home.

Designing and building a new home is an opportunity to create something brand new, something unique, something as individual as you. We’re working on several homes that defy any stylistic categorization because their inspiration, their “style” comes from the lives that their owners lead. These homes are built with character as the major construction material – the architecture and the “decorating” can’t be separated.

Houses like these are so much more than just the number of bedrooms and the size of the floor plan – they’re the ones that you return to look at again and again and think, “wow, there’s something about that house that I really like”. What you like about those houses is the result of the owners having taken an active role in creating the design from the very beginning. They realize that homes are made of life, of love, of memories, of wishes, and of spaces — not of living rooms, crown molding, and draperies.

Our conversations with these clients don’t begin with, “how many bedrooms do you need?” or “how big of a house do you want?”, they start with “what are your dreams and how do you want to live?”.

Those discussions, and the designs that evolve from them, are what a truly custom home is all about.

Good home design brings people together in pleasant ways. It provides for the family as a whole, and for each individual’s privacy. Good design does all of these things, and it starts by taking the time to ask clients about the details of their daily lives. What is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning-head straight for the shower or down to the coffee maker? Do the kids eat breakfast at the table or do they grab a pop-tart on the way out of the door?

A recent client of mine described her family’s eating style as “hit-and-run”. That little pun tells me a great deal about the design requirements of her kitchen – much more than I’d discover poring over cabinet catalogs with her. We spend hours talking with our clients before a single line is drawn. To commit any less an effort to an examination of the personality of their family is to rob them of the benefits of custom home design.

Lifestyles change from generation to generation, and houses should change too. And yet, the majority of homes built today are little more than updated versions of 300-year old Colonial designs. Incredibly, we are still building parlors and formal dining rooms for families that never use them. A better house and a better living experience are the results when client and Architect work closely together to examine the uniqueness of the client’s lifestyle and how it informs and molds the design of the home.

There’s a battle underway in many communities across the country. On one side is the irresistible force of progress – home builders and developers, and homebuyers in a hurry to move into brand-new homes. On the other side is the immovable object of community government and citizens already settled into growing neighborhoods. The combatants are fighting for the right to determine what neighborhoods look like – specifically, how to control “cookie-cutter” houses and assure diversity of architectural design.

The families that occupy the first few homes in a new neighborhood are often quite surprised when they find that a nearly identical version of the home they call their own is under construction two doors down. How did that happen? After all, when they met with their builder they chose the brick color, the siding color, and the roof shingles; they reversed the plan and picked the upgraded landscaping package. But suddenly their vision of home ownership, their biggest investment, their pride, is diluted by similar visions sprouting up all along their street.

Home builders and developers, on the other hand, are under intense financial and competitive pressure. Development starts many years in advance of construction, when land developers purchase and “stockpile” land for future use. It’s a speculative game, and developers cross their fingers that homebuyers will desire today the land that they bought ten years ago. The trick is to appeal to a wide audience and buy land in areas now that will be in demand later. Part of that wider appeal is expressed in the design of the homes that are offered for sale or for construction in those neighborhoods. The safest route is always a small number of easily modified designs that can be accurately priced and that will satisfy the desires of the largest number of people.

When a homebuyer sits down to “customize” one of these plans, he’s usually choosing from a pre-determined vocabulary of options designed to work well together and produce an attractive home. That’s a workable system until you consider that in a given neighborhood, where the homebuyers are similar in age, income, education, values, etc., it is very likely that their tastes in home design are similar too. And before you know it, two different buyers starting with the same basic plan have chosen similar materials and colors. Oops – now what?

Everyone, of course, has a right to decide what his or her own house looks like. Some of America’s best homes are unique, distinctive designs that truly reflect the personalities of their owners. But those homes are rarely built in “typical” suburban neighborhoods. More likely, they’re on properties isolated from any significant architectural context and need relate only to trees and land forms.

Most homes in this country are built next door to other homes. A group of homes together forms a neighborhood, and a neighborhood often looks best (and hold it’s value best) when the homes in it share a common design thread. But that’s where the battle starts. Houses can be too similar, and neighborhoods can take on a monotonous character. The appeal of attractive homes is weakened. Soon homeowners and city officials are criticizing the repetition of comparable houses, and builders and developers find themselves having to defend their right to build what their buyers are asking for.

It’s a complex and difficult problem but there are solutions. The most common is instituting a design review process — a system for determining whether a particular design is compatible with the homes around it. Although inherently subjective, design review can have a high degree of objectivity if clear guidelines are drawn up. Historic neighborhoods around the country have successfully used design review for many years to maintain their character and property values. Newer communities use design guidelines to simultaneously guarantee design compatibility and assure architectural diversity. The design review process requires that attention be paid to the design of each home as an individual project, not just as another permutation of a standard plan. It also requires that each proposed design be evaluated in terms of the houses around it.

But because of the inherent difficulty of imposing rules upon something as subjective and personal as the design of a home, the design review process can be cumbersome and painful.

A better solution is to put more “custom” in the custom design process. A “true” custom home is one that is designed from the very beginning with a particular owner’s needs, dreams, desires, and wishes in mind. When a home reflects a family’s idiosyncrasies it displays a unique character that can’t be transferred to another home. It is, by definition, distinguished from all others. Building more true custom homes in neighborhoods facing “cookie-cutter” problems adds much of the desired variety that raises the level of architectural integrity for the whole community.

For the homeowner, there are several rewards for getting involved in the custom design process. The most obvious is a house that is a better fit to a particular family than a speculative home designed for a broad market. That might mean that more joy and satisfaction is found in living there. It might mean that the spaces built are actually used – unlike many new homes where obsolete formal spaces are little more that places to display furniture.

But the biggest reward may be financial. A custom designed home is often a smaller home, and smaller homes give you the choice of paying less for the entire project or of spending the savings on better details throughout (and it’s the details that make truly fine homes). A custom designed home may also make more efficient use of materials, saving money on the basic structure of the building. Even the added costs of design professionals can be absorbed through cost savings in the house itself.

A builder client of mine recently called to discuss what could be done for a potential buyer who is “struggling” to afford to build a home in a neighborhood where the design regulations encourage the use of expensive exterior materials. The buyer’s budget is limited, but he doesn’t want to give up space in the house; he’s thinking of cutting back on the exterior design. If he does, he’s certain to incur the wrath of the design review board. His buyer may not know it, but he’s about to become a foot soldier in the continuing battle over the right to control the look of our communities.

The “Jetsons” cartoon series of the 1960′s was a fanciful glimpse of American home life in the 21st Century. George, Jane, Judy, Elroy and Astro lived in slick automated house that looked as futuristic outside as it was high-tech inside. Here in the twenty-first century it would seem logical that house design should be evolving towards a space-age look, but traditionally styled homes that model themselves after eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century designs are more popular than ever. Is the architectural design clock ticking backwards or are these classic exteriors simply attractive skins hiding twenty-first century muscles and bones?

A Brief History

American house design has weathered four centuries of rapidly changing architectural styles and tastes. The early homes built by European settlers were simple and unadorned, reflecting the familiar forms of their homelands, but as prosperity grew they began to take on decoration copied from the great buildings of Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, home style followed the fashion of the day – Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Neoclassical, Tudor, Italian Renaissance. These classic homes are often easily dated by tracing the architectural style to the time period when it was popular.

The twentieth century brought architectural revolt. Tired of modeling their designs on European archetypes, architects invented new forms of home design. The Arts & Crafts movement, for example, sought to create a more intimate connection between the house and the lives of the occupants. The warm and cozy bungalow homes scattered throughout this country are an enduring heritage of the Arts & Crafts style. The Modern movement promoted the house as a “machine for living” and stripped all ornamentation. Chicago’s Prairie School promoted an architecture born of the landscape – a style that Frank Lloyd Wright worked to perfection. Wright’s homes are still considered innovative eighty years later.

Then along came the post-World War II housing boom and a sort of chaos in housing style. In the rush to provide thousands of homes for newly prosperous Americans, good architectural design often took a back seat in new tract home developments and much of the scale, detail, and warmth of earlier “styled” homes was lost. Craftsmanship became a lost art. New homes and quality architecture have been only passing acquaintances since.

But our recent period of economic good fortune has revived an interest in the value of good architectural design. Books and television shows scrutinize design and construction and even an entire cable network is dedicated to educating us about housing and home design. More and more new communities are employing Architectural Review Boards in an effort to promote a higher level of design quality and to help maintain a consistent character throughout the community. And at architectural offices across the country, custom home clients (even those with modest budgets) are once again asking for attractive, well-designed structures with character and personality.

But these new home clients aren’t asking for space-age design. They’re seeking the comfort of familiar forms, of gables and double-hung windows, of brick, stone, and wood, of cozy porches and sidewalks, and they’re looking at older neighborhoods for design inspiration.

Back To The Future

Where then here in the year 2001 are the” futuristic” homes? In many ways they’re already here and rapidly becoming more high-tech. In one form or another, many of the technological gizmos in George Jetson’s cartoon house are available to us today. The microwave oven and home automation systems were “predicted” by the Jetsons’ creators. And George kept in touch with Jane and Mr. Spacely via a real-time audio/video link – something that the Internet has made a reality.

But the majority of the technological changes in today’s homes are “invisible”; hidden within the walls, tucked away in the basement, or disguised as man-made products designed to mimic natural materials.

While many foundation walls are still built with concrete block or poured concrete, other technologies are gaining acceptance. Foundation walls can now be built of precast pieces or assembled from Styrofoam blocks that are then filled with concrete. And although our homes are still built mostly of wood, more of that wood is manufactured from smaller pieces – “engineered” lumber — or cut from genetically enhanced trees grown in managed forests. High-quality “wood” siding and trim products can be made from a slurry of wood fibers and resin or specialized lightweight concrete. Even window glass is treated with a microscopic energy-saving coating and the space between panes filled with Argon gas. And that attractive stone exterior next door? It may be “cultured stone” instead. It’s almost impossible to tell the difference.

Some of these technological improvements give architects more design freedom. Engineered lumber with its greater structural capacity allows us to remove some interior walls and open rooms to each other. The increased energy efficiency of window glass means more and larger windows, better views to the outside and more daylight inside.

Why should you consider prefabricated modular buildings? Here are three good reasons: money, time, and variety. Prefabricated modular buildings generally cost less than buildings made through traditional stick construction.

Prefabricated modular buildings can be ready for occupancy in a much shorter time than stick-build buildings. And with the growing number of builders converting to the construction of prefabricated modular buildings.

The speed with which prefabricated modular buildings can be erected accounts in part for their lower cost. Virtually all prefabricated modular buildings are constructed for the most part in a factory where skilled and unskilled assembly line workers using highly sophisticated equipment can produce more with a high degree of efficiency and accuracy than an individual builder could hope to do.

Prefabricated modular buildings are made year round in climate controlled factories. Stick-built buildings – especially those constructed in parts of the country with severe winters – are built on schedules subject to being adjusted for weather conditions. Construction flat out stops in many parts of the country where it gets too cold to build and spring rains can cause further delays.

To be fair weather can affect prefabricated modular buildings too specifically in terms of foundation work and also its possible weather could delay the delivery of the prefabricated modular buildings to the site. But the actual construction of the prefabricated building is unaffected by weather.

Factory assembly lines can lower the per unit cost to the consumer by producing each unit faster, using unskilled labor, and purchase large amounts of materials at quantity discounts. The finished product is also of higher quality. One drawback of mass production is uniformity. The factor turns out high quality low cost prefabricated buildings but the way factories are set up to mass produce, all the units they produce will be identical and if you don’t like the style being produced then you’ll have to pay more to have a custom designed prefabricated modular building constructed especially to suit your needs and tastes.

Another advantage of prefabricated modular buildings is saving on the hidden cost of vandalism. The local contractor may find this a serious problem at a building site but an enclosed factory provides much better security. The building contractor no doubt passes on the cost of vandalism to the end consumer.

According to the executive vice president of the National Association of Building Manufacturers one of the biggest contributing factors to the growth of the prefabricated modular building industry is the diminishing supply of trained and skilled craftsmen in the construction trade. As time has passed, older craftsmen have retired and the younger generation has chosen less physically demanding careers. The number of apprentice programs has declined too. All these factors contribute to an increase in the prefabricated modular building industry.