Parade of Homes 1998
By Michael Bridgeman
This month I look back only 25 years to the 1998 Parade of Homes presented by the Madison Area Builders Association (MABA). I appreciate that 25-year-old houses may not be “historic” to many preservationists. The Madison Landmarks ordinance has no minimum age requirement, while the National Register of Historic Places generally requires that properties be at least 50 years of age. In fact, houses of any age have things to tell us about design, social status, marketing, and more. Besides, I happen to have a 144-page guide to the 1998 Parade with line-drawings of the 36 homes open for viewing. Even better, the guide includes floor plans for each house (which is no longer so for Parade guides).
1998 Parade guide cover
The Parade of Homes is a snapshot in time and place, and a narrowly focused one at that. The annual showcase doesn’t aim to capture the wide range of housing built for a growing community; by 1998 the Parade was putting more emphasis on large houses beyond the means of nearly all working class and many middle-class families. Besides, the event serves a defined market with particular conditions. I make a few observations below after reviewing all the designs in the 1998 Parade booklet and visiting about a third of them in July. For comparison I looked at the 1957 Parade of Homes plan book, which is also in my collection. My “field work” is hardly definitive, but points to ways that preferences, taste, and aspirations have changed.
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Vertical Expansion
Over the years, Parade homes have grown. For the 1998 Parade, 24 of the 36 house descriptions provided finished square footage. The range was 2,475 to 4,900 square feet with an average of 3,451. In 1957, MABA set a 1,100 square foot minimum for Parade houses. Only five properties (of 23 total) included numbers in their descriptions for an average of 1,584 square feet. While these are very small samples, the average square footage of Parade houses more than doubled over 41 years. That corresponds with national trends.
1610 Blue Ridge Trl., Waunakee
So, while Parade houses grew larger, the lots they sat on did not necessarily get much bigger. To accommodate the growing square footage, builders went vertical with second stories, semi-exposed lower levels, or both. The house illustrated above is described as a “3,778 square foot ranch with a fully exposed lower level.” Here the lower level accommodates two (of five) bedrooms, a full bath, a large family room, and some unfinished space. Every 1998 Parade house that looks to be one story high, like this one, has a lower level. You can argue about calling this a Ranch [a] given the quoins, arched doorway, and quasi-Palladian windows, but the term is used widely in the 1998 booklet for this kind of house.
These two houses fit Virginia McAlester’s “Millennium Mansion” category, a style she dates from 1985 to the present. Key features are a complex high-pitched roof; tall entryway with arch; multiple wall cladding materials (brick, stucco, clapboard); differing window sizes and shapes, sometimes arched; and asymmetrical composition. The house on the left (Hawk Feather Circle) is one story high with a lower level, visible on the left, that has one of four bedrooms plus a family room, exercise room, and theater room. The photo on the right (Savannah Court) shows a two-story house with all three bedrooms on the second floor. The Millennium Mansions in the 1998 Parade of Homes are tame expressions of the type; more egregious examples are often derided as “McMansions.” [b]
35 Hawk Feather Circle, Madison
Several two-story houses look to historical sources, such as the “classic Georgian residence” above that has brick cladding on all sides. In 1998 masonry often appeared only on street facades. Like all but one house in the Parade, this house has a three-car garage; the lone outlier had a two-car garage. [c] Other traditional styles in the Parade were Craftsman, Prairie, and Neo-Classical; there was a single Contemporary house (see below). Many designs were described as “Transitional” which I take to mean eclectic, blending and simplifying motifs and ideas from multiple sources. Expanding up or down has long been a way to gain space, though most of the houses in the 1957 Parade were one-story Ranches. Six were tri-levels.
The Great Room
By the 1998 Parade of Homes a great room appears in many plans, though the term is loosely used by designers and builders. Today, a great room denotes a large, open space that usually combines the functions of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Open interiors appear to varying degrees in other twentieth century design movements. What distinguishes the great room is the inclusion of the kitchen and the emphasis on verticality, so that walls that divide functions are minimal or absent and ceilings are often high. This sort of “open concept plan” remains popular in new construction for houses large and small.
Some Parade houses have traditional plans with separate rooms labeled living room, family room, dining room, etc. Others, like the plan above, have a so-called great room without fully integrating the sitting-eating-cooking spaces. Here a wall separates the kitchen from the great room and the dining room is completely removed and oriented to the foyer.
This Contemporary house has a fully developed great room with “large glass window walls and lofty ceilings [that] provide a stunning effect as you enter the home.” A skylighted ceiling rises two stories over the great room space and is lower over the dining area and kitchen. Still, all three functions—sitting-eating-cooking—share one unencumbered horizontal space and that occupies nearly the whole first floor. There are two bedrooms on the second story and one on the lower level, which also has a family room.
The Master Suite
Every house in the 1998 Parade of Homes has a “master suite” or “master bedroom” [d] typically comprised of a large sleeping room, often with a tray ceiling; an ensuite bathroom; and a walk-in closet. I don’t know when these suites became universal, at least in more upscale houses, but there are none in the 1957 Parade of Homes plan book.
The 1957 Parade houses were comparatively smaller, yet all but one had three or four bedrooms, one of which may have had an en suite bathroom for the parents. Often the household shared a single full bathroom, though an additional 3/4 or 1/2 bathroom was not uncommon. The 1,550-square-foot plan above has three bedrooms that share a single full bathroom plus a half bathroom. There are no walk-in closets.
By 1998 the owner’s suite is often widely separated from other bedrooms, as in the example above, where you find it tucked away on the far right behind the garage. Two bedrooms share a bathroom at the far left of the plan, across the intervening expanse of the embryonic great room-dinette-dining room-kitchen. This one-story “Ranch” has a lower level with a fourth bedroom that shares a bathroom with the family room. In most of the two-story houses in the 1998 Parade, all bedrooms are on the second floor, including the main bedroom.
….
Looking at two Madison area Parade of Homes events spaced 41 years apart gives a very incomplete picture of local residential architecture. Still, looking backward and forward from 1998 suggests numerous ideas, trends, and stories which could be explored more deeply. Maybe we’ll all know more by 2048 when I sign up for a Madison Trust walking tour of one of these Parade neighborhoods.
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Notes
[a] In A Field Guide to American Houses (2015), Virginia McAlester has sections on the Ranch (1935-1975) and the Styled Ranch (1935-1985). The 1998 Parade of Homes falls beyond the time frame for both categories, not that any style adheres to rigid timelines.
[b] McAlester’s Millennium Mansion is a descriptive classification. She acknowledges the non-taxonomic term McMansion as “referring to any new house deemed to be either oversized…or disjointed in style.” (p. 708). Kate Wagner dissects and dismembers the type at McMansion Hell.
[c] Of the 23 houses in the 1957 Parade of Homes, one had no garage, five had one-car garages, and 17 had two-car garages which included one carport.
[d] The term “master suite” has recently fallen out of favor because of its troublesome racial and gender implications. Among the terms now in use are “main bedroom,” “primary suite,” and “owner’s suite.”
Image Credits
The plan for 113 Richland Lane is from Madison Area Builders Association 7th Annual Parade of Home Plan Book, 1957.
Other floor plans and line-drawing elevations are from Madison Area Builders Association Parade of Homes, 1998.
All photographs are by Michael Bridgeman.