| OCR Text |
Show High Time Women Should Be Architects By FLORENCE BITTNER One of the world's unanswered unan-swered questions is how come men design the houses women have to live and work in? Do men allow women to design their industrial facilities? MY FAMILY has lived in this house so long we believe this is the way houses come. Some of its more obvious design problems have been corrected at considerable expense, ex-pense, but the mistakes are repeated, endlessly in other houses. This spring I had the opportunity op-portunity of being a judge at the home show, and it was a fun experience and I was impressed with the delightful and liveable changes in some basic concepts. Like putting the washer and dryer by the bedrooms where the laundry is generated. SOME OF the age-old errors are still there, however, and some old ones 1 had thought had been discarded dis-carded have come back. Front doors that open into the gizzards of the house. No one wants the bathroom door visible to the salesman at the front door, and a view of the kitchen sink isn't all that . thrilling either since few women keep the kitchen spotless all the time. KITCHENS SEEM to come in two sizes: miniscule and immense. One home had a kitchen so big you could grow a barley crop in the southern end. Two homes had kitchens so small that if the dishwasher dish-washer door is opened, the cook has to stand in the dining room to load it. Broom closets. What happened hap-pened to broom closets? Not one did I see in all those beautiful homes. Storage closets and dressing rooms and mud rooms by the back door, but the old fashioned broom closet wherein can be stored vacuum cleaners, .cleaning equipment and brooms are nowhere seen. AMAZING HOW often doors are placed to bump into each other. Open the hall door - when someone is coming out of the bathroom, and there's a collision of doors andor bodies. Mr. B. spent half his life mumbling about his closet door which could only be opened if the door to the room was completely closed. Narrow hallways. I know, space is at a premium, but so is peace and quiet. There is a rule in my house that all occupants oc-cupants will need to be in the same place at the same time, so if there's one person in the hall, there's bound to be two or three. FAMILY togetherness is a fine principle, and nowhere better practiced than going and coming to bathrooms and bedrooms. Not necessarily peaceful and constructive togetherness, but definitely physical proximity. 1 have a thing about the new design of houses called split entry. Wife killers. You can't go anywhere without stairs. They will either keep a mother young and agile or break down her varicose veins. ONE OF the problems people run into when they decide to restore old homes either in Salt Lake City where the early homes are usually about 75 years old, or even in New England where they are frequently over a hundred years old is that the houses were chopped up into little rooms. So what do you think they're doing with the new houses? ' , There wasn't one with a living room big enough to hold a gathering of. the clan. They had entry ways and family rooms and conversation conversa-tion pits and plant rooms and living rooms tucked away to one side for all the world like a dentist's waiting room. Back to the old front parlor idea. I expected to see the family bible and a flower arrangement made out of Great Aunt Minnie's hair just like the front parlors I remember, where children were expected to tiptoe and behave. CATHEDRAL ceilings. 1 know they're lovely and all the thing just now, but being the practical type, I look at them and imagine having to wash those ceilings. Or paint them. Say what you will, orfe day there's going to be a great festoon of cobwebs way up there. So back to the old homestead. home-stead. It has its faults, but they're comfortable and accustomed. ac-customed. The hall is narrow, the stairs are steep, the . shelves too high, but it's home. |
