Mirontschuk: Another thing we shied away from was the turret entries. There were a lot of houses that had the big turret, and I think that's almost passe now.

Ney Manley: And the round, rotunda staircases.

Thatch: In some of them, there are stairway galleries in the middle of the house. You have the foyer and then, maybe in the middle of the house, you'd have the stairway.

Ney Manley: A lot of those galleries. And you would enter on them, or they would be lining the back of the house. And they would break the galleries, either through columns or drywall sculpting, which was very nice.

Derick: Or doors.

Thatch: Sometimes with the stairs they'd bring in a lot of glass with the stairs. It was like in the middle of the house, and they would bring a courtyard. So they'd bring a lot of light to the middle of the house and also up to the second floor where the stairs ended.

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Multifamily

Thatch: The one thing we haven't really touched on is the multifamily and urban. That seems like it's a big growth area as far as the entries we saw. And also, I think they're addressing it very much as an urban or pedestrian scale. You know, doors to the street. Looking at things [and saying], "How can we be creative?"

Mirontschuk: Socially responsible housing.

Ney Manley: It seems so much more cutting-edge, modern, exciting. It's not the typical townhouses lined up one after the other with the very traditional elements. There were some really cool things happening.

Thatch: I think it's becoming mainstream actually for single-family builders to start looking at multifamily and also infill. It's not a typical apartment project anymore.

Ney Manley: And they tend to be a much more hip buyer. The traditional stuff isn't cutting it.

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Kitchens and Baths

Derick: Three more trends came to mind. One is there were clearly furniture-like pieces in the kitchen, even in the really tiny little homes. In the sweet little homes, the center islands looked like furniture pieces.

Falconer: And in the bathrooms.

Ney Manley: I like those double islands that were real long. One of the houses, because it was a long galley kitchen, in order to get around you had to put in a double island. And so circulation was much better than with what we call the "Ping-Pong table" in the kitchen because of the monster islands that are almost too large. I thought that was a pretty cool solution.

Falconer: And those two islands did look like furniture. It had some open space to them.

Ney Manley: In what is typically an undesirable configuration — a galley. It worked.

Derick: The same thing came up on the island in the Home of the Year, and that was the Craftsman approach, detailing with Arts and Crafts — not Arts and Craftsman style — but just using craft elements to individualize and personalize the spaces and make them really exciting spaces even though they weren't that large.

And then the third one was in the master baths. They were smaller. Fine materials, but smaller. We did see the his and hers, but also they weren't just those large, vacuous spaces with all tile of one nature. Instead it was multiple materials.

Ney Manley: Going back to elevations, I was pleased to see there was so much dimension to all of the elevations. I guess maybe it's because I'm in the Northeast, where they tend to be fairly flat. Multifamily, single-family, there's just so many cool things happening — jigs and jogs and heights. There was one multifamily where the heights varied significantly. Even in the single-family, maybe as simple as a portico on the front of the house. Or the garage wing coming out. I'm so used to a vinyl, flat box.

Mirontschuk: But you know they even did some stuff with very traditional elevations. There was one that used a lot of stone — unfortunately when you went to the back side all you saw was the vinyl. But they had done a really good job — with a little bit of a twist with the floor plan — of taking a very traditional Northeast elevation and making it look like it was an old house, but it had a very contemporary floor plan to it. It was an interesting twist to it. I remember that one where they took the stair and actually twisted it on the inside, which totally reconfigured the typical center-floor Colonial.

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