Comfort Class, Mr. Sucher?

   Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1996, p. B10.


   Local Architects Set Their Cities' Style

   By Alexandra Peers

      [Photos] Southern California style by Michael C.F. Chan.
      A Barry Sugerman design in the Miami area. Frederic
      Schwartz's look for the Hamptons.


   Who is Bill Poss and can he add a 10% premium to the value
   of your home?

   In the stratosphere right below Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard
   Meier, Michael Graves and Frank Gehry are a host of
   architects well-known in their own regions and in their
   field but not yet, if ever to be, household names.

   Whether known for their abilities to create the distinctly
   Vail mountain chalet, the Chicago townhouse that aims to
   feel like a ranch home or the opulent Los Angeles
   residence, there are architects in every major city whose
   names real-estate brokers trumpet in ads as a selling point
   when a house hits the market. They are the architects local
   home-builders wrangle to work with on a "signature" home.
   And they are who buyers pick when they want more input in
   their dream house than they think a superstar might give
   them.

   Consider Mr. Poss, an architect who has designed about 80
   homes, mostly in Colorado. "We don't have a distinctive
   style like a Robert Stern or a Richard Meier," says Mr.
   Poss, "You can pick out their homes." He adds, "Our homes
   don't beat their chests" with design. Nonetheless, Aspen
   real-estate broker Sandye Whitaker says Mr. Poss
   "understands the Colorado lifestyle. His homes are elegant
   yet cozy and that's really hard to do." The Poss name,
   "adds value out here," she says.

   For most Americans, an architect is a rare luxury. Fewer
   than 2% of homeowners build a custom-made dream house
   instead of buying older homes or selecting from a
   real-estate developer's or home builder's menu. The cost of
   an architect for a custom-made home averages about 10% to
   15% of the total project's costs. But some brokers say
   that, if the architect is enough of a local celebrity, that
   cost is recoverable. Betsy Losh, a broker at Seattle's
   Ewing & Clark, says "a good architect is going to get you
   a little bit more money-and a quicker sale."

   But beware. Architecture has elements of both art and
   fashion, and there's often stunningly little agreement on
   what is a great house among the architects who design them,
   the home builders who construct them and the real-estate
   brokers who may later have to sell them. "What is great
   architecture doesn't particularly sell well," notes Carolyn
   Miller of Wimbish-Riteway Realty in Miami. An architect's
   signature masterpiece may prove too modern, too customized
   or too imposing to be a livable home.

   Moreover, architectural styles can go out of fashion, or be
   copied (often badly). The exterior steel staircases and
   boxy white-block design of many California and Miami
   buildings may someday make a New England saltbox house look
   like a simple masterpiece. Driving around the West, "there
   are all these postmodern houses [from the early '80s] with
   little square windows and Michael Graves-like details on
   everything and you just shudder," says Aspen home builder
   Steve Hansen. A buyer doesn't want a house that you can
   look at and say "Oh, that was built in the '70s."

   Right now, in architecture, "there are little camps all
   over the place, there's no single aesthetic that's taking
   over," says Deborah Gimelson, a broker with New York's
   Orsid Realty. While architects have become local and
   national celebrities, not all add resale value. "To be a
   selling point, the architect has to have proven him or
   herself," to call up a particular style to mind when the
   name is mentioned, at least in that region of the country,
   Ms. Gimelson says. "If you say John Doe and only four
   people in New York know who that is, who cares?"

   Miami architect Barry Sugerman may not be a household name.
   But he won "Home of the Year" in the Best in American
   Living Awards given out three years ago by the National
   Association of Home Builders for his white, modern
   three-bedroom, 4,220-square-foot home priced at $625,000.
   In New York's Hamptons, a name that carries cachet is
   Frederic Schwartz of Anderson/Schwartz Architects. A former
   associate of influential alchitect Robert Venturi, Mr.
   Schwartz has had a home featured on the cover of House
   Beautiful magazine. Mr Schwartz is currently working on a
   pet project: a low-cost $199,000 home in trendy East
   Hampton, N.Y. "In the Hamptons, it's easy to build a $1
   million or $500,000 house," he says, but it was a challenge
   to build a 1,800-square-foot home for under $100 a square
   foot. (Other work, including the pool, site preparation and
   iandscaping are pushing the cost of the project slightly
   above that figure.)

   In Seattle, architect Stuart Silk has been dubbed by the
   Seattle Times the city's "best-known young architect" and
   his homes have been featured in Metropolitan Home and
   Progressive Architecture. Mr. Silk's homes, which mix
   modern design with traditional materials, studiously
   avoiding the "woodsy" look of most Northwest architecture,
   are "very, very hot," says Mrs. Losh.

   In Chicago, one of the name architects is Larry Booth, who
   is also featured this month in Architectural Digest
   magazine. "There's a very Chicago flavor about him," says
   Koenig & Strey broker Nancy Joyce. The foyers are big
   enough to greet guests, there are airy kitchens, a family
   room, sometimes French doors, she says. The homes have "a
   stamp of livability."

   Even when building a customized dream house, it's
   resalability is key, because the average American moves
   every four to five years, warns Los Angeles architect
   Michael C.F. Chan, who designed tennis star John McEnroe's
   Malibu beach home. Architecture is often "like a product --
   people just like to buy a brand name, like fashion, like
   Norma Kamali -- so they know what the project will look
   like." But buyers also have to look for an architect who
   will give them input. "It's the architect's job to provide
   a product that the average lifestyle "will fit into."

   Los Angeles philanthropist Iris Cantor, along with her
   husband, financier B. Gerald Cantor, have their own
   sculpture garden in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
   and probably could have had any architect they wanted for
   their large Louis XVI-style home currently under
   construction. But they wanted a collaborator.

   "You see some famous people's houses and you look and you
   know who did that. You can look and say this is a Frank
   Gehry building, this is a this, this is a that," says Mrs.
   Cantor. But "we wanted beautifully proportioned spaces and
   a wonderful staircase and a wonderful place in harmony with
   our art." The couple owns a major art collection of
   sculpture, 19th-century paintings and German Expressionist
   works. They chose Mr. Chan as their architect-for the
   second time-because "he's not a person who dismisses you."

   "Some architects let design get in the way of pleasing a
   client's functional wishes," says Mr. Poss. But, he adds,
   it is not always a prima donna architect who's the problem;
   people often don't know what they want or don't know that
   the architect knows better. "They want a contemporary home
   but they also want a rustic home."

   Says Mr. Chan, "Clients come to us in their 30s, and they
   want to do a very, very modern home and we have to tell
   them" they may tire of a house with no historic elements.

   Fashionable houses aren't always the architects' fault; the
   demands of homeowners also are faddish. In the late 1980s,
   every new homeowner wanted huge, unusual window treatments
   or skylights. Now, security and maintenance concerns have
   made that yesterday's trend.

   What are people asking for now? Says Mr. Poss: "More
   creature comforts, larger entertainment spaces, a billiards
   room or theater room and bigger [vacation] homes for
   extended families." Architects say that other details in
   demand are built-in niches for televisions, sculptures, or
   knickknacks; home offices; media rooms; and breakfast
   nooks. Says Mr. Booth, "I ask [clients] where do you want
   to eat breakfast and what do you want to look at?"

   [End]