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Freeport, IL 61032
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In This Issue
My Porch and Welcome to It
Spring is in the Air!
HOUSE PLAN CRITIQUE
Quick Links
 
 
Featured Article
April House Plan -Front
For this issue, we've selected from EPlans. You can find the plan at www.eplans.com   Look for plan #HWEPL69468 or click on the picture of the house to take you directly to the site! 

 

My Porch and Welcome to It
(This article was originally written by Pat Leitzen Fye for the Freeport Journal Standard; and has been edited for publication in DesignMatters, April 2010)
 
 
Front porches are as American as hot dogs. Well, about as American as ancient Greece and Imperial Rome. To quote Michael Dolan in his book The American Porch; An Informal History of an Informal Place, "the American porch acquired its style and substance from antecedents around the world." But like nearly everything else we Americans brought with us from the places we've immigrated from, we have made the front porch our own.   
 

"Familiar faces around me
Laughter fills the air
 Your loving grace surrounds me Everybody's here
Furniture's out on the front porch Music's up loud
 I dream of you in my arms
 I lose myself in the crowd." 
Bruce Springsteen
"Meet Me at Mary's Place"
 
 
The front porch appears throughout our popular culture, in books, television, movies and music. Think about Aunt Bee and Andy imparting bits of wisdom to young Opie. Recall passages from depression-era John Steinbeck novels. New Jersey-born rocker Bruce Springsteen's lyrics evoke an image of the front porch as the place to lose your cares. The front porch is so much a part of New Orleans's culture that each new house I helped build in a Habitat for Humanity volunteer gig in that great city included a front porch. The front porch became, over time, across all social and economic levels and throughout the nation, the place for the family and the neighborhood to gather. 
 
My family hits our porch in early spring, when the sun boils in on its eastern face. We position ourselves in chairs borrowed from the kitchen. We lean our faces towards its warmth while we cradle cups of coffee and balance books on our knees. On lazy summer Sunday afternoons, it's the perfect spot for a snooze on the porch swing. And in the evening, we light candles - usually citronella! - and catch the cooling breezes when the heat and humidity stifles.   

Sadly, we rarely see anyone else taking advantage of their fine front porch. The advent of air conditioning heralded the demise of front porch sitting. The demise of front porch gatherings brought with it a loss of neighborliness. Turning inward, we lose touch with the folks around us, and we can see the sad impact of no longer knowing, and caring about, our neighbors. 
 
But front porches are making a comeback. What's returning are not the "pseudo-porches" of the 80"s suburban homes, generally too shallow and too narrow for "porchological utility", but real porches - where you can hang a porch swing, place a table and chairs for breakfast or a card game. It doesn't take much to bring back your porch. A visit to garage sales and second-hand shops offers a bounty of porch attire. A fresh coat of varnish, a bit of fresh fabric, sweeping, shining and painting make a huge difference. Fix up the roof and hang a flag; add potted plants or hanging baskets for seasonal beauty. 
 
The best way to bring your porch back to life? Sit on it! Invite your friends, family, and neighbors over for coffee or lemonade. Let laughter and music ring again on your block. Forget about air conditioning, deal with the mosquitoes, and enjoy your home and your community from the fabulous perspective of your American porch.
 
 
Below: An old-fashioned sitable porch.
 
southwest side addn 
 
Below: A hot tub deck, with shade and design interest provided by the pergola.
 
southwest side addn 

Below: The front porch of the Freeport/Stephenson County Visitors Center.
(designed by cf+a)  

 
southwest side addn 
 
Outdoor spaces aren't just limited to your home! Employees, clients and customers also appreciate a welcoming outdoor spot. 
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Recipe of the Month
Strawberry Salad 
 
Spinach + Strawberry Salad with Balsamic Dressing
adapted from Cooks.com by Pat 
 
 A heavenly spring mix of sweet, salty and tangy all in one!
 
SALAD:
1 lb. fresh spinach, washed & dried
1 pt. strawberries, washed & sliced
thinly sliced red onion (to taste)
caramelized pecans*
blue cheese or feta cheese crumbles (optional)
 
DRESSING:
1/3 c. balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. salt
1/2 c. sugar
1 c. olive oil
1 1/2 tbsp. poppy seeds
Combine dressing ingredients except the poppy seeds in a blender and blend until well-mixed and slightly thickened. Fold the poppy seeds into the dressing by hand.  
 
CARMELIZED PECANS:
Spray a cast-iron skillet with Pam or lightly oil with vegetable oil and heat on high.  Place pecans in hot pan and sprinkle generously with kosher salt and raw sugar.  Continue to toast in skillet, stirring constantly.  Watch closely as nuts burn easily, especially in a cast iron pan.  When nuts are lightly browned and sugar has caramelized, remove from pan to cool completely.  They may be sticky at first but will be lovely and crunchy when they've cooled.
 
Toss spinach with sliced strawberries. Cut thin slices of red onion in to smaller pieces and gently toss with spinach & strawberries. Toss nuts and cheese crumbles on top of salad, or serve on the side. Toss all with dressing to serve immediately, or serve dressing on the side to suit individual taste.
 
Spring is in the air!
 
It's nearly time for outdoor living!  Spring beckons us to enjoy once again nature's beauty, fresh air, and vibrant fragrances.  Summer, with its allure of sizzling barbecues, icy drinks, children chasing fireflies at twilight, and the scent of fresh mown grass, encourages us to linger outside.  Even autumn, redolent with air that reminds us of cedar, leaves and crisp apples, asks us to stay a bit longer, to be a part of the whole earth, rather than one who just rests on it within the confines of our roofs and structures.
 
While we must live in shelters, and take great pride in them as a reflection of our lives and personalities, take some time this month to consider the outdoors and where you and your family fit in.  Ask yourself, when was the last time you sat on your front porch with your friends and neighbors, or shared your back deck with the neighborhood kids stopping only briefly their water play in the hot summer sun, for a quick glass of lemonade?  How long has it been since you sat in the dark on a summer's night on your screen porch listening to the hum of mosquitoes outside the netting, the buzz and bang of June bugs hitting the screen, the call of courting crickets, the whirring wings of bats seeking their nightly meals?   When did you last watch a sudden evening thunderstorm pelt your street, lightning brightening the street like daylight, safe beneath the sheltering roof of your porch?
 
Pause, consider, reflect, doze, chat, dream, converse, snack, refresh, play, read . . . your front porch, and even your back deck, has so much to offer if only you seek it out.

Featured Article

Design Matters
House Plan Critique
April 2010 
 
Eplans.com # HWEPL69468
 
OK, so "cottage" isn't really accurate for this home, though certainly from the outside view one could characterize it as a cottage. But inside? Spacious, roomy, light-filled AND 2,300 sf on one floor - not what we normally consider cottage size. But no matter, here's a house plan that we selected for two main reasons: one, it's quite beautiful, and two, it has four separate and distinct outside spaces - a front porch (wrap-around!), a screen porch, a deck and a terrace. Since this month's focus is on living outdoors, it seemed a perfect fit.
 
And while we chose it originally for these outdoor spaces, it turned out it's a plan we really like a lot. On our four-house scale, we think it merits a strong 3.5 - with our few tweaks, though it could be close to a perfect 4!
southwest side addn 
The exterior of this home displays a great choice of materials - the stone base that wraps around and adorns the dining room window wall and the cedar or fiber-cement board siding and shingles in the gables offer up a definite cottage feel with the added benefit of being low-maintenance. We normally don't care for the garage being front and center from a street perspective but this one seems not to overwhelm, but to grace the streetside elevation. We like the garage doors and the simple gable roof above them.  We talked at length about the two dormers and decided to lose the small one over the dining room window - the scale is off, especially the scale of the windows to the gable. On the end dormer we'd move the double-window a bit lower just to center it better between the tip of the gable and the porch roof line. We can't really determine what the rear elevation looks like, though it would appear to be somewhat complicated, given the two bay bump-outs, the large windows and the deck and screen porch. (See the sidebar article on this plan's outdoor spaces.)
 
Now, let's turn to the floor plan. First, a warning: The photos you'll find on the website of this house as built is not true to the floor plan. It's actually a mirror image of the plan and there have been a couple of changes made to the original design. (Note to the plan buyer - yes, you can change the plans, but please have a skilled architect or builder assist with that.) Two major changes are the addition of a stairway up to the area over the garage - a good idea, if you need the space, but you'll have to move the closet in bedroom 3 and figure out how exactly to make the stair work from a head-room standpoint. The photos also show that the dining room has been walled off from the "grand room" - not an improvement, in our estimation. 
living room april 3
April Living Room
Aside from that caveat, we think this is a great floor plan.  There are a couple of minor changes we'd make. We'd add a full closet at the entrance foyer rather than the "cubbies" that appear there - much more functional and in keeping with the somewhat formal atmosphere set by the foyer.  We think the laundry room is too small, so we would lose the door into the master suite and extend that wall out just a bit in order to add a countertop for storage and folding. You might even build in bins for laundry sorting beneath the countertop. 
 
We're not crazy about this newfangled idea of passing through the master bath to get to the closet or for that closet to be facing the front porch, but these are matters of preference. If this really gave you heartburn, it could be redesigned. In the master suite, we would install a real fireplace (and the same in the lower level future bedroom), just because we're not fans of fake fireplaces.
april bathroom 
We like the kitchen layout except we would move the sink closer to the middle of the island so that there's workspace on either side, swapping the dishwasher with the end cabinet.  We have changes in mind for the deck and screen porch too (see the sidebar) that we think would improve the access and the view from the grand room. In the family bedrooms, we would add windows to the side walls for more light and ventilation and bi-fold or sliding doors on the closets for complete access to the contents (don't you hate closets you can't really see into, much less get something out of?!)
 
We appreciate that in this plan, the lower level can be left unfinished, if you don't need all that space or want to build it out in phases. But what's great is that this lower level floor plan gives you a really good sense of how it can be used, and the layout will allow your builder to properly stub it out for future heating/cooling, water and electric.   If you were to build it out completely from the get-go, this is a fabulous 5,000 sf house for a large family, on a footprint half that size. Oh, and by the way, a design feature we would add in this lower level is a wine cellar, or root cellar if you're a gardener, (or both) beneath the "porch slab". This could be easily done by a simple rearranging of the "future powder room" to install a door into that area.
 
The terrace (unattractively called the "patio slab") off the "future social room" makes a great space as your parties overflow outdoors in the warm months.   We probably wouldn't place a hot tub there, but would tuck it into the woods close by for ultimate privacy and enjoyment of the twinkling stars peeking through the great trees that will, of course, grace the site you choose on which you choose to plant this house.  This plan really wants a sloping site to take advantage of its exposed lower level design.
 
What a nice house - large without being overly large. Adaptive, economical use of space and great outdoor living. Definitely a keeper plan!
 
 

Below: Main Level 
April Floor Plan
 
Below: Lower Level
 
Last Call
 
The American Porch
 
Back in the days when our office critiqued the Associated Press House of the Week plans for the Journal Standard, a friend and colleague, Architect Gerry Estes, presented a copy of the book "The American Porch" to Chris for his library. Gerry was heartened by our continuous urging to make front porches use-able and friendly spaces rather than the (hopefully waning) trend to stick a small roofed space on the front of a ranchburger and call it a front porch.  We miss Gerry and his wisdom and insight, and dedicate this issue to his memory and his influence on Freeport and Stephenson County.   For more info:
 
http://www.theamericanporch.com/
 
http://www.amazon.com/American-Porch-Informal-History-Place/dp/1592282717/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270849513&sr=1-1

Christopher Fye and Associates

BE SURE TO LOOK FOR OUR NEXT ISSUE, COMING OUT MAY 2010!