House of Horror, Times Two

Around the age of 12, I became obsessed with books that showed residential floor plans. They also had pictures of the houses, and given the era, they were kind of Modernist. I remember lots of glass curtain walls, potted plants, and squarish leather sofas. I quickly worked my way through the public library's collection, and went on to draw my own on graph paper.

I never quite lost that interest, so I still check out the floor plans in the Homes section of the Sunday Star Tribune. The renderings that accompany the plans range from somewhat interesting to amazingly ugly, but this recent one took the prize for cluelessness:


Victorian, yeah, that's the word that comes to mind when I look at this house. And charm is a close second.

Although it isn't quite as revolting as this rendering from an ad in a recent Spaces magazine. Spaces is an advertising vehicle created by the Pioneer Press and sent for free to high-income zip codes.


It's like a hobbit house as conceived and built for an Ed Wood film. Every element of the Craftsman style and the Not So Big House approach has been drained of its integrity, enlarged, and stuck together with cedar shakes.