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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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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