Great Article in this Sunday’s New York Times
February 3rd, 2010A builder in this image-conscious shore town for 18 years, Mr. Buddenhagen was musing on his shift in focus since then — away from the 3,500-square-foot house, which he had considered very comfortable for the average family, and toward the 7,000-square-foot showplace. He at first resisted the rush to size, and scoffed at the greed of those who joined in. But eventually he, too, played along — doing very well in the process.
Mr. Buddenhagen is still following the money, but these days it’s leading him in the other direction. Convinced that people with the financial means to buy ostentatious houses were humbled by the economy’s near-collapse, he has decided to size his newest speculative project for a more conservative and cautious mindset.
The house, going up on just under an acre on Long Lots Lane, will offer his usual architectural detailing and custom woodwork, but at a smaller scale: 4,400 square feet.
“I’m not trying to make a cheap house,” Mr. Buddenhagen said. “I’m trying to make a more affordable, quality house.”
The notion that the new “big” in housing means high aesthetic value in a less cavernous package is being tested here by several high-end builders. A downsized house by Westport standards is still larger than the national average for new construction — about 2,480 square feet — but the shift is notable in a community that has lost hundreds of older houses to the bulldozer over the past decade to allow for residences that sizewise often resemble hotels.
Some of the largest new houses in Westport — 9,000 square feet and up — have been sitting on the market for more than a year. A 13,000-square foot, 20-room colonial on Clapboard Hill Road did sell a few months ago, but not until 18 months after its completion, at a sharply reduced $6.85 million.
Buyers are looking for less vast, more functional spaces, said Judy Michaelis, an agent for Coldwell Banker who often works with builders. “People want to be a little cozier,” she said.
Not that builders expect the wealthy to turn their backs on the estate lifestyle. But younger buyers who might have gone to extremes on square footage several years ago seem to be placing a higher premium on pleasing design, superior construction and energy-efficient features.
“There is a sector in the market that wants to go smaller, but there seems to be a cutoff point,” said John A. Wicko, an architect who is working with builders in Westport and Greenwich. He added, “I don’t know yet what that number is.”
Michael Greenberg, who runs a design-build firm that specializes in high-end houses, said he was still designing some very large houses for clients. Nevertheless, he thinks the market is slowly moving toward a time when “the new showplace will be, instead of about size, more like, ‘Look at my solar panels.’ ”
The challenge facing designers and builders of speculative houses as they experiment with scaling back is figuring out what features are expendable. As they note, even those upper-income buyers who espouse a “less is more” ethic frequently wind up ordering add-ons, like home theaters, electronic lighting systems and swimming pools.
Martin Schmiedeck just sold a 9,000-square-foot house he built on Old Hill Road that has nearly $40,000 worth of copper roof covering, as well as a monument-size slab of white marble atop the kitchen’s center island. The project worked out well for Mr. Schmiedeck: it sold within a few months of its completion, and the price, $5.4 million, wasn’t that far below asking.
Yet in planning for his next speculative venture, to be built just up the road, Mr. Schmiedeck is thinking smaller. He wants to emulate the quality and amenities of the 9,000-square-foot house within 6,000 square feet — while leaving the way open for buyers to add space and amenities if they wish.
“The difference now is we want to offer a little bit of a menu,” he said.
Thus, while the new house won’t have an elevator, Mr. Schmiedeck will stack the closets so that an elevator could easily be installed. He will most likely leave the lower and/or third-floor levels unfinished. And perhaps the master suite will have only one sitting room instead of two.
Mr. Buddenhagen’s 4,400-square-foot project will not have a master sitting room. He put one in his own house in Weston — a three-year-old 6,000-square-foot farmhouse colonial that is now listed for $2.549 million — but his family hasn’t once used it.
In fact, he said, he only recently discovered that it had a small Sub-Zero refrigerator that had never been plugged in.
What he sees as essential for the new, smaller house is a combined kitchen/family room area, four bedrooms, four baths, two powder rooms, a small library, a mud room and a capacious dining room. Even if people rarely use a formal dining room, he said, “they still envision that big holiday feast.” He has listed the house for around $1.895 million.
And he hopes to downsize himself, once he sells his Weston house. He wistfully recalled the 2,300-square-foot antique house in Westport where his family of four lived while the larger house was being built.
“We loved it,” he said. “Within a week of moving into the house in Weston, my wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘What are we doing?’ ”