By Mia Hanuska
HGTV’s houses are captivating. They always look perfectly pristine, with beautiful styling, unique architectural details, and the customer always beams when they see the final product of their fixer-upper, or love it transformation, or property brother remodel. Watching as a young, aspiring architect, I was enthralled by how easy the shows made it seem—a quick design meeting with the clients, and only thirty minutes later they’d have a completely different, redone house. I was obsessed with the modern farmhouse style Joanna Gaines would incorporate into nearly all her designs, and I saw the same flipping potential she did when the show would present the original house. Looking back now, I can only see the intrinsic antiquity and originality these homes had: intricate scrollwork, large stained glass windows, and solid-wood features that were always removed in the final design to make room for the new modern look. Who wants an outdated house?
Many houses built today follow the modernist style popularized in the 1920’s, that focuses on simplifying forms: hence the term “form follows function.” Ornamental elements were limited and seen as unnecessary, a contrast to the previous neo-gothic revival experienced in the early 1900s that emphasized decorative tracery, arches, and pinnacles. Think of a basic, cookie-cutter suburban American house—there’s a high chance it’s modernist.
That’s one of the problems of these renovation shows. They often lack the creativity or opportunity to create unique homes, instead, the houses turn out identical to those down the street. These cookie-cutter houses, despite having high curb appeal, lack the personal character older houses so proudly display. They’re also often built quickly, resulting in a poorly built building teeming with issues, creating the cyclical process of needing to renovate due to extreme issues, fixing the issues, then through the renovation process, creating new problems. Furthermore, cookie-cutter houses are also more unsustainable and less flexible compared to a custom single-family home. Renovating a house simply for the sake of renovation, hoping to find a buyer after the makeover, only creates unnecessary waste in the housing market.
Plus, these renovations often feature faux characteristics, where costs are saved by using paint to mimic a certain texture, such as wood or stone. Details like this are appealing to home-DIYers, who see professionals “faking” something and believe they can do the same. Thus rises the house-flipper. House-flippers buy homes to makeover into more “intriguing” houses, and often DIY many aspects themselves. One popular trend on social media platforms was painting countertops to “look” like marble. However, makeover trends like these are where DIY renovations become wasteful. The DIYs are done poorly, either without the proper steps taken or simply with a lack of creative skill, and the end result ends up looking worse than before [Figures 1 & 2]. Obviously, it is much cheaper to paint countertops than buy all-new marble ones—especially considering the amount of maintenance marble requires—but, the countertops don’t need changing. In fact, the house doesn’t need flipping at all. House flips often do not increase the value of a home, despite what many believe. Flippers tend to choose an “older and smaller” house (compared to a non-flip home) full of character, then remove what makes the house unique to make it appealing to the mass market, furthering a culture with the belief that a “good” home has been made over.
Aren’t renovations sustainable though? They help market unsellable homes that would go to waste otherwise, right? Not necessarily. Although architecture should clearly focus on sustainability, the flipping process—specifically when shown on social media—often ultimately creates a house no one wants, full of unfinished and crude DIYs that end up lowering the marketability. Justified by saying “it’s unique” or “it’s my house, I can do what I want,” these counterfeit designers simply produce shoddy houses. In reality, many of the old houses they chose “could be slightly modified to meet today’s codes and energy standards,” and remarketed with the original character still intact. Historical homes have personality, charm, and beauty: please flippers, leave them alone.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.