Timeless design principles beat suburban McMansions for beauty

By David McElroy · June 26, 2021

I shot a casual photo of Lucy in front of our house this afternoon. She was happy in the warm summer sunshine. And I liked the perspective of the house behind her. It made her seem like the world’s friendliest guard dog.

After I posted the photo in a couple of places, a friend called me to say how much she loved it. Then she asked if I could take the same sort of picture of her dog in front of her house. I hesitated.

My house is an inexpensive old home in a mixed neighborhood. It was built in 1927. It originally didn’t even have running water. (I don’t know when the kitchen and bathroom were added.) I bought it six years ago as a cheap foreclosure. It’s nothing fancy.

My friend’s home is in a high-end suburb in a much nicer part of town. It’s worth about half a million dollars. The house has all the features that modern consumers want. But to anyone who understands symmetry and principles of design beauty, her house is a monstrosity. It’s an ugly crime against design.

How could I explain to my friend that her fancy house would look terrible as a background for her dog? How could I say that without insulting her taste?

This wasn’t going to be easy. I took a deep breath.

I asked my friend what she liked about my photo of Lucy with our house. I mean, what did she like about it enough that she wanted one of her own dog with her house?

She thought about it for a minute. Then she slowly tried to explain. She said it was cute to see a small dog look as big as the house by the perspective. Then she said that the combination of Lucy’s vertical shape and the house’s horizontal shape made an interesting visual contrast. And then she had an epiphany.

“The house looks balanced behind her,” she said, as though nothing like this had ever occurred to her. “Even though the halves are different, the parts behind her are equally weighted — and they’re nestled in all that greenery. It just looks like something from a magical fairy tale.”

I asked her to imagine exactly the same sort of photo in front of her own house. She was quiet for a long minute. Then she finally laughed softly.

“A picture like that would look awful with my house,” she said with surprise. “There’s no balance.”

We talked about design for another 15 minutes or so. I never did call her house ugly, but she finally said that she was starting to see her house in a very different way.

The front of her house is oddly balanced. She lives in a suburb where almost all the trees where clear-cut to make construction easier. (There are a few strategically placed smaller trees, but none of the natural ones were left.) The design of the front facade seems intended to be a mishmash of styles — combining whatever features the builder thought might be popular.

Her house would get a rough review on the snarky architectural design site called McMansion Hell.

I ended up agreeing to make a photo of my friend and her dog, but not anything like Lucy’s picture in front of our house. My friend sees her own house in a new way now and she might even be sorry she got into a conversation about design with me. (She works with business accounting, so I doubt she’s given much thought to design before.)

My inexpensive little house isn’t a marvel of design. It never was a fancy house and it’s seen better days. When I decide where I want to move next, I’ll use this house as a cheap rental. It was never intended to be a long-term home for me. I didn’t buy it for its design or charm.

But a cheap 1927 working-class house with design integrity beats a fancy 2012 McMansion any day, at least in some basic ways. Why? In ways that are hard to explain, it has integrity. It’s not a grab-bag of features thrown together to attract tasteless people with money.

No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy good aesthetic taste. But if you take the time, you can learn good design — and you’ll be surprised how much more you appreciate your world when you do.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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