How to Avoid the Generic Home
There is a certain kind of house you see everywhere now. It rises quickly, framed and enclosed in a matter of weeks. The roof pitches are exaggerated, the gables multiplied, the windows arranged by cost rather than light. These homes are not failures. They simply feel rootless, as if they drifted in from a national template and touched the ground without learning anything from it. They belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
To understand why so much of American housing feels this way, it helps to look backward. The story is longer than most people think.
Homes arranged by pattern rather than place. A reminder that repetition is not the same as identity. The design patterns mapped after the war continue to define American Suburbia to this day.
After the Second World War, the United States experienced a scale of housing demand unlike anything before it. Millions of returning soldiers, the GI Bill’s financing, the expansion of roads, and a newly confident domestic economy converged into a massive suburban boom. Developers like Levitt & Sons borrowed techniques from wartime manufacturing, bringing repetition, efficiency and speed to the making of houses.
But the early suburbs, for all their repetition, still held a kind of human scale. Homes were small. Lots were modest. Rooflines were simple. You could walk down a street and feel a sense of proportion. These were houses built with real materials. Brick, plaster, wood. They changed slowly under weather, gaining character instead of shedding it. Even when many houses looked similar, they felt grounded. Time, variation and hand labor added quiet irregularities that softened the uniformity.
Before that era, catalog homes from Sears offered pre-cut kits delivered by rail. They were affordable, ordered like furniture, but assembled by local carpenters with real craftsmanship. The kits came in dozens of styles. A kit Tudor would never be confused with a kit Craftsman. Even when mass-produced, these homes carried the imprint of place because the people building them lived in the communities where the houses were raised.
Somewhere between the optimism of the postwar suburbs and the present, something changed.
A house that began as a simple kit, finding its character through patience, weather, and the quiet shaping of the garden around it. “The Zwetsch-Payne-Clarke House, 39 Tillinghast Place, Buffalo, New York. Photo by Andre Carrotflower. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Beginning in the 1980s, zoning codes pushed garages to the front. Streets widened. Houses grew larger without adjusting their proportions. The cost of labor rose while profit margins tightened. National plan libraries became standard. Materials shifted toward engineered products that valued speed and uniformity over texture and aging. Developers focused on optimization. Build times shrank. Neighborhoods expanded rapidly. And variation, once an organic by-product of human building, shrank to almost nothing.
Today’s subdivisions are designed by algorithms, supply chains and spreadsheets. Rooflines are engineered for maximum square footage. Windows are placed for cost. Details are standardized to the fastest assembly method. The homes are efficient, but the efficiency has become so refined that the architecture has been drained of particularity.
You can feel the difference when you walk through an older neighborhood. The scale is quieter. The street trees have had time to mature. The houses show their age in ways that feel natural rather than strained. Materials have a conversation with the weather instead of trying to hide from it. There is a sense of belonging that comes from proportion, texture and time. These places were not trying to be special. They were simply built with limits that encouraged thoughtfulness.
A template home set onto land without learning its language, disconnected from itself and the world around it.
Avoiding the generic home today is not about nostalgia. It is about intention. It is about resisting the forces that have made houses feel interchangeable. It begins with understanding how you live. Not the idealized version of life that fills architectural magazines, but the real rhythms of days. Where you want morning light. Where you need quiet. How you cook. How you rest. How you move when you are tired or hurried. These small patterns form the structure of a home more than any stylistic choice.
A non-generic home also begins with listening to the land. Every site has tendencies. A slope that invites a gentle split-level. A stand of cedars that shapes the approach. A view that becomes more meaningful when framed rather than exposed. A patch of earth that stays wet after rain. Builder specials ignore these conditions. They treat land as a platform. Good architecture treats land as a collaborator.
This attention does not always produce dramatic forms. Often it results in something quieter. A slight shift in massing to follow the contour of the hill. A deeper overhang to accommodate the Pacific Northwest’s rain. A window placed not because the plan calls for it but because the light in that spot is soft and consistent. These are small decisions, but they accumulate into a home that feels specific rather than generic.
People sometimes assume that designing a non-generic home means extravagance. In truth, it usually means restraint. It means fewer gestures but stronger ones. It means making decisions deliberately rather than accepting defaults. It means understanding materials well enough to let them age without anxiety. A home that is intentional often feels simpler, not more ornate.
There is also the question of time. Generic homes age in a peculiar way. They look dated quickly because their details are tied to cost-driven trends. Their proportions do not have the calmness that lets buildings endure. They resist the climate rather than working with it, so they require more correction. A well-designed home, by contrast, tends to settle. It gains depth. It feels better ten years after it is built than it did on the day it was finished. And because it has character, it holds value. Prospective buyers and renters may not know why a house feels better, but they recognize the difference immediately.
Hip roofs gather the structure under a single calm gesture. Natural materials stay protected in their shade, while glass traces views and light across the day. Stepped forms guide the building gently toward the ground.
Avoiding the generic home is not about prestige. It is about living in a place that feels like it belongs to you and to its surroundings. It is about continuity with the past without feeling trapped by it. It is about dignity, proportion and the quiet pleasure of occupying a space that was made with care.
We did not arrive at this era of generic houses by accident. We arrived through optimization. Through speed. Through the desire to solve housing at scale. But scale has a way of erasing the particular. The antidote is not nostalgia but attention. A willingness to think slowly about how you live and where you live. A willingness to let a home grow from the land rather than be imposed upon it.
When a house carries this sense of belonging, it becomes something that lasts, can be lived in for decades, and that stands quietly but confidently in its place.
