Dear Real Estate Listing Agents of the World

[akirlu]

If you list a house you're trying to sell as a "Craftsman," it had really better have some architectural features that Gustav Stickley would have recognized as habitues of his magazine. Ideally, it should have been built during the Arts and Crafts era, but if the design style is in the Stickley spirit, I am willing to accept that you meant "Craftsman-style". However, if the listed house turns out to be a dead-ordinary suburban split-level ranch or saltbox bungalow, you're only pissing me off by lying in the title of your listing.

Comments

[ckd]

By "Craftsman", they clearly mean "contains a toolbox purchased at Sears".

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Damn, you stole my joke.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Or possibly that one of the builders was using a Craftsman drill. Yah.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Those are so not craftsman. Jesus.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

So not. It's just another chorus of my tired old song: words mean things.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

they probably meant you need to be a craftsman to fix the place up. :)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Actually, I sometimes think they're trying to imply that the builders were "craftsmen" -- or possibly that they've noticed that other people use that word in their listings.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I confess that having made an effort to understand it a couple of times, including just now reading the Wikipedia article referred to, I still don't clearly understand what a Craftsman is. The house I live in is not, I take it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Craftsman houses are an expression of a design movement at the turn of the 20th Century, spearheaded by Stickley as founder of The Craftsman magazine. The style is very distinctive because it was pretty clearly articulated through the magazine, with lots of drawings provided by Stickley for readers to use.

In terms of how to see the specific features that mark Craftsman style, here's a link to another Craftsman-style California bungalow.

What to notice: deeply overhanging eaves; shallow pitched roof, large porch under an extension of the eaves; square, thickset pillars supported by tapering, square-cross-sectioned base; exposed, square beams as decorative element in the porch pillars, and elsewhere; small-over-large pane divisions on the windows. Those are typical features. Others include minimal or no use of turned wood in favor of of square and rectilinear shapes, unfussy decoration, use of mixed materials -- especially popular was mixing field stone and wood.

I think the deep eaves, the exposed beams, and the broad, deep porch are some of the most crucial design elements to my eye -- notice that the two falsely claimed 'Craftsman' houses have none of them.

If you want to find out more about the style, you could do a lot worse than check out a book on Greene & Greene from the library.

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should be looking at Colonial houses. I have been looking at houses with my cousin, and we saw a plainly Craftsman exterior on a "colonial" house.

Did you know that Craftsman houses have a name for every style, just about?

It's been sold, already. Good luck house hunting.