Home Designed For A Lifetime

What do women really want in a house?

Traditional Home put the question to female readers and discovered that, above all else, women want homes to be flexible. They want a house that will last a lifetime, that can change with a family’s needs, a house that can accommodate in-laws or a home office, for instance.

The magazine did not pose an idle question. After getting their answers, editors corralled an esteemed group of female design professionals to create such a home and actually see it through construction. (The house is being built in Dallas.) Margaret McCurry, of Tigerman-McCurry in Chicago, was the architect leading the (mostly) all-women project.

McCurry’s floor plan, plus three different exterior styles, are featured in the November issue of the magazine. TH calls it The Traditional Home Flexible House. Too Big is what we call it.

McCurry delivered a stunning house. There’s no doubt about it. It’s a traditional foursquare-style. But somewhere along the way, and certainly not all McCurry’s doing, the house turned into a castle.

This thing is huge - 5,575 square feet in its largest variation, 5,000 square feet in its smallest.

Just about every room under the sun is in the plan: a large entrance foyer, commodious living room, dining room, family room, eat-in kitchen, laundry-utility center, in-law apartment on the first floor; upstairs there are four bedrooms, a rec room, play room and a screened porch. Even the garage is oversize.

With that amount of space and that many rooms, any house - and this one needs a half-acre of property around it - could be flexible.

Karol De Wulf Nickell, editor in chief of the magazine, tells us it needed to be sizable because the home is being built in Dallas, an affluent market where big sells. But, she says, “the home is easily shrunk.” In fact, she goes on, a reader from North Carolina is building the home at 4,500 square feet.

That’s still too big.

We would like to see TH and McCurry follow up with a flexible house that is more reality-based, at about 2,500 square feet, a bit larger than the average home being built today. Smart design in a sensible container - that is the tricky part and the real dream house.

For those who can’t get enough of Cindy Crawford, check out the October/November issue of Elle Decor. Find six pages devoted to the supermodel’s newly redone New York digs, a duplex near SoHo.

Helping her with the decorating was friend and designer Michael Smith of California, where Crawford makes her other home.

“She’s essentially a romantic, but not of the cabbage-rose-and wicker-chair variety,” Smith tells Elle Decor. “She’s a literary-heroine romantic.”

Translation: Crawford likes a handsome, tasteful look.