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Yellowdog's avatar

Have you seen any bad renovations or changes to beautiful or historic houses?

Asked by Yellowdog (12216points) August 2nd, 2019

What’s with all these tasteless renovations involving covering houses with neutral or grey spray-paint?

As an educated and well-known afficionado of Traditional architecture and traditional / natural building materials, I have been pleased that architects still exist who know how to use stone from the Cotswalds and antique brick from the deep south or Appalachian Virginia.

It seems that many residence designers, although they can design a reasonably artistic house, seldom really know what makes a house look and feel balanced and whole.

Because of the dubious building materials used on many of today’s houses, they are often spray-painted a neutral buff or grey.

But what is appalling me, why are they applying such ticky-tacky paint to rare, expensive materials?

In the past month I’ve seen two tacky examples I pass daily.

In one case, a brick Virginia Colonial style house, made with antique brick, with a poplar clapboard colonial addition with green shutters, and a third annex to that was antique brick again,
—someone covered this with white-buff styrofoam spraypaint. Do they think this looks good?

In another case, a sorta rural-Gothic faery-tale cottage that looks like it makes you want to drink steaming herbal tea and wait for hobbits and collegiate academia—with beautiful natural stone from gosh-knows-where— was spraypainted flat gray, losing all its character and charm.

What’s with these tasteless renovations and changes to beautiful homes?

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4 Answers

filmfann's avatar

I used to live in Concord, in an area that had houses designed in the Cape Cod style. Very cute, but not large. Several owners redesigned their homes, making them much bigger, but completely different from the surrounding houses.

jca2's avatar

On Facebook, there are a bunch of old house groups. It’s not uncommon for them to post photos of “before and after” showing an old house (interior and/or exterior) and then what was done to it – woodwork painted, walls taken out, etc.

I also see it a lot with furniture. They take beautiful old antiques and paint them white or teal or distress them, and it changes the look totally. I don’t know – i guess to each his own.

Yellowdog's avatar

@filmfann Cape cods and small eastern-seaboard homes have their charm precisely because they ARE small and cozy and have a lot in a small, comfortable space. Building big houses onto them, or expanding them, yeah, kind of defeats the purpose of having a Cape Cod house or cottage.

@jca2 There are still people who convert antique telephones into modern ones, or into radios. I even know of one Steampunk punk who took an antique clock by C.F.A. Voysbey (sp?) and converted it into something for his fantasy aethereal transmitter.

MrGrimm888's avatar

Lol. I live in Charleston, SC. On the old peninsula, there are hundreds of houses, in various states of repair. There are tricky construction codes. You can’t even use a power sander.

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