Not an architectural “style” at all, but just a bad design.
My brother’s house has a patio right next to the kitchen. Being that the patio is the best part of the house, and they do a lot of cooking, this would seem like a sound design, right? Picture this: You’ve got your arms loaded up with chips, salsa, and beer, and want to head out to the patio. You exit the kitchen via the dining room, go through the living room, past the master bedroom, down a hallway, through the garage, outside along the entire length of the house, and get to the patio – only to realize, of course, that you forgot the bottle opener.
Yes, you need to spiral all the way around the house to get somewhere six feet away.
I really object to stone countertops, also. A lot of expense and maintenance for a countertop that’s way likelier to break a dish that slips out of your fingers. Um, yay.
Not an architectual feature, but goes hand in hand with that–stainless steel appliances. Have these jumped the shark yet? Expensive and finger-printy. Um, yay.
I don’t like ceramic tile much, either. It’s cold. It’s really hard (hazard if you drop stuff, hazard for small children). It’s dangerously slippery when wet. Grout causes all kinds of issues long-term.
Sheet vinyl flooring… the cheap crap on enormous rolls at the back of Lowes. Dangerously slippery when wet, looks like crap, curls at the edges, and if you drop a knife on it? The knife will cut it.
Widow walks that aren’t meant for walking on. Wtf?
Houses have mostly traditional horizontal siding be it vinyl or aluminum usually in white. They also have a porch that sticks out on the front with vertical rough wood slabs stained redwood or a dark brown. It’s like somebody took an ice shanty and nailed it to the doorway of their home. Make all the siding the same type and color please.
I despise wall-to-wall carpeting in all it’s forms, in all rooms, and in any climate. It’s an abomination. Wood, bamboo, tile, linoleum, hell even concret I’d prefer over wall-to-wall carpeting. Area rugs are cheaper, easier to clean, and much easier to replace.
I like dormers. My last house had a dormer in a finished attic. I couldn’t find a good picture via Google of the badly done fake dormers. I swear I’ve seen a dormer in a low-pitched roof, and the dormer was located impossibly over a porch. It looks weird.
These can either be chimneys that have no bottom opening (and may not actually exist below the roof at all), or worse, chimneys that DO have an opening for a pipe, but aren’t lined, so that if you naively try to connect some kind of fire-holding apparatus, you’ll burn the place down.
Not that I’m bitter just because I dropped $600 on a beautiful cast iron woodstove only to find out that installation would cost me over one grand because apparently fucking bricks are fucking flammable now (yes, I know, creosote bloo blah hibbity dibbity ding dong; I’ve since looked it up), or anything. :mad:
As someone who has experienced the wonder and joy of a leak in the upstairs bathroom, I can suggest why you wouldn’t want your washing machine upstairs.
I have some friends that have a dumbwaiter in their house. The live at the beach, so the garage is on the ground floor and most of the living area is on the second floor. The dumb waiter goes from their garage to the kitchen.
In my house, the first floor is concrete block and the 2nd floor is wood. Using stucco over both gives a consistent appearance. You need the stucco anyway to water proof the 2nd floor. Older houses just use paint over the concrete block. Stucco looks better.
What a waste of good wall space. They aren’t an efficient way to heat anywhere, but in Florida there are usually only 30 days out the year you could use one without cranking up the AC.
“Snout houses”. Heh. I’ll have to remember that one. They are extremely common from the eighties on in Southern Ontario; I’ve lived in several. Here’s a street of them in Mississauga. I rented a basement apartment in one once. I would get off the bus and walk into the subdivision and, even after two years, have to count the houses and check the address to make sure I went to the right one. The landlord painted the garage doors. It didn’t help.
My nomination for architectural sin? Helicopter siting. This is where they raze the site flat and drop a house on it, as if from a helicopter. Granted, many examples of houses like this may simply be newly-constructed and the landscaping is yet to come.
As far as I can tell, most houses build in last ten years are two stories around Orlando. I checked the census bureau and multi-story houses passed single story about 1998.
When I bought my house in 2004, the difference between a 1900 sqft one story and 2800 sqft two-story was only about 30k. I will freely admit that I was seduced by the model and bought more house than I needed.
Do you have any evidence that the Florida housing market builds less two-story houses than the national housing market?
This isn’t about housing, but college architecture. The local CC has recently built some buildings that feature lots of corrugated metal on the exterior. Very modern and shiny. The thing is, it’s really sunny and hot here most of the time, so it’s quite common to get painfully bright light reflecting off the building into your eyes. Ow.
Seems to me that feature would work much better in, say, Seattle. Or Scotland.
Townhomes with a garage that is a tall flight of steps below the kitchen. Who wants to drag their groceries up to the kitchen? When I was looking for a place for my mum, I suggested to the builder that they consider offering the option of a dumb waiter (small elevator) that could carry a couple of sacks of groceries from the garage to the kitchen level because anyone over age 60 would love that feature.