I can envision how the job will look when finished when I work on a remodel or build project. I cannot design for squat. I know how to put things together, just not what things to put together.

I have found actual design pros are as diverse as there are ideas. So, when one or two 'pros' say something is not good, that is simply their opinion.

Example, I like watching Joanna Gaines (Fixer Upper), but would not want her to design my house.

And, I'd be a terrible accountant, since I almost flunked math in high school.

I too for example like watching Joanna Gaines and while I think she has a very good eye, I too would not want her look.

However a good designer can look past the "style" of the house to see if it's all been well put together, whether the style of the house is contemporary, craftsman, georgian, farmhouse, shingle, etc.

I draw contemporary realistic still lives, yet I can also appreciate a well done abstract painting. A good painting, or a good house, will have all the elements working together that help create a cohesive whole.

Fortunately, I have some very thick skin and know I'm not a design expert by any stretch of the imagination. I can take some constructive criticism!

In the resort area in which I live, there are many cottages built around 100 years ago. Most of them are very nice in their design and most likely were not designed by an architect. My theory for how they came about to be so nicely designed is that their designers never saw a mobile home.

Mark makes a good point about how appealing and "well designed" many houses were 100 years ago. But it's really not so mysterious. Compare some of those houses with some of today's houses and one may find that 100 years ago:

--Plans were much simpler and houses tended to be only 1-2 rooms wide;

--Rooms and interior spaces were simple and reasonable for their uses;

--Houses were often simple gable shapes or cross gable shapes, like Monopoly houses and hotels;

--Mass and scale were very much on a human scale;

--Workmanship and detail were often very well done with pride of workmanship;

--Climate and terrain were influential in the design and construction of most homes--one could easily understand a house designed for a northern climate versus one designed for a southern climate;

--Horses, and later cars, were kept at bay and out back, away from the house; and dare I say,

--Somehow folks had happy lives without having to have so much "storage" for seasonal stuff and hobbies!

Just some random thoughts about the differences in houses in the last 100 years. I'm sure some folks will be along shortly to elaborate on what I don't understand! :-)

The book "The Old Way of Seeing" by Jonathan Hale discusses this phenomenon, how at one point people had a innate sense of proportion and could build pleasing looking, well-proportioned houses without the help of an architect, or by adapting plans from pattern books. He proposes that the Victorian era is when things really started to go wrong, and that now, we are so used to taking a form of some sort and plugging different details into it, that most people can no longer tell whether something is well designed or not.

I tend to agree, although I think there is some fantastic ill-proportioned Victorian architecture.

I also think that we have lost our ability to visualize. People used to be able to read detailed descriptions and "see" or visualize what something looked like by its description --mostly because they had no other choice. Then people had drawings to look at and would be perfectly comfortable buying something based upon an illustration.

I have had design clients who no longer seem to be able to visualize completely what something looks like from Actual Photographs. They "don't really know until they see it in person". Soon, architectural plans will have to be literal virtual reality for some people to understand what they are buying or building --short of seeing an already built example in real life.

I think this is a real problem. I have had clients say to me. "well you are a designer, and an artist, it's easy for you to visualize it because you can create it". But we are getting to a point where people can no longer completely interpret photographic or near photographic representations of something, especially scale.

The above is a bit off topic, but I think it is related to why people have trouble deciding whether something is good or bad (and there is a lot that is bad out there), --if they already having trouble interpreting what something IS, that already falls short of being able to make a decision as to whether that thing is good or bad.

A hundred years ago we had the wonders of

--no indoor plumbing in rural areas, whereas now multiple bathrooms often sheathed in marble and granite take up valuable space. How I miss the fun of seeing overturned outhouses and their five foot piles of shite in rural Ohio every Halloween-after morn!

--the pleasures of pumping your own water at the kitchen sink. Now, a cornucopia of bathroom fixtures in thousands of sizes, styles and finishes. As Bernie Sanders said, "no one needs 23 choices of faucets." Or anything, for that matter. The one per cent and their extravagances are starving the poor!

--one car only for all but the filthy rich. And it was kept out back with the mice in the garage. Now, wannabe arrivistes boast of their multiple garages! Save the planet, get a bicycle.

Palimpsest, back in the day our school curriculum also included those "unneeded" subjects like music and art. Maybe that has something to do with it too?

A lot of nice aspects of old homes were form following function. Southern homes with big porches and high ceilings and central hallways and windows on multiple sides of a room were all ways to make the heat bearable. Porches were a nice shady place to sit outside that simultaneously shaded the houses' windows. High ceilings let the heat rise higher than the people in the rooms. Central hallways and windows everywhere allowed for a cross breeze.

I don't know where people lost awareness of what contributes to the function of a home, but I don't think your average buyer could list 5% of features of a home that actually make it comfortable and work well, but if you could scare up my great-grandmother, she could name a ton. That means you now don't have buyers asking for these features and therefore builders aren't building these features and therefore all future buyers of those homes have nothing to show them the possibilities they're missing out on.

Perhaps it's related to the overall difference between modern people keeping things short term and living places short-term or keeping things and living in places long-term. Quality naturally goes down when you're looking a temporary situation, so you get a lot of people living in mediocre homes for a few years instead of living in a great family home for 40 years. I wonder when the term "starter home" was coined.

Old houses also greatly benefited from a long tradition of homes of not greatly changing. The style of the finishes changed, but for, like, a hundred years (Victorian era to the 40s), it seems as people generally wanted approximately the same rooms of a routine size in similar places in the home (formal entertaining spaces, smaller and cloistered kitchens, bedrooms of humble sizes, one bathroom per floor, if that, etc.). People themselves were also pretty consistently small. In the process, all the kinks got worked out of those sorts of configurations serving those sorts of people.

We're now going through a lot of architectural growing pains as people figure out how to make modern preferences for big kitchens, no formal spaces, and open floor plans work consistently well. And at the same time, people are a lot bigger, so we're still figuring how big everything else needs to be in proportion to us. My great-grandmother and her sisters were known around town as "the tall Brown girls" (their last name was Brown), and they topped out at 5'7". We now refer to my 5'6" sister as the family runt.

I'm enjoying everyone's insight! Jillius, I'm the 5'8" family shrimp. :)

I am really shocked, no one mentioned other "well designed" styled houses built in 60's, that we commonly refer as a "ranch". Utilizing perfect square design 4'x4' or 2'x2', house protected from the elements by yellowish or pinkish limestone backing right to the insulation and no sheathing.

Some of them used "new materials" like asbestos tiles, key-lime colored appliances, carpets in a bathroom, over the moist basement floors and even kitchens[that in some cases are still there today], toxic fire retardants in the insulation.

--Plans were much simpler and house hallway divided in two parts with bedrooms on both sides
--Houses were often simple gable shapes

--Workmanship and detail were often done with pride of workmanship; "See ma - I build my own house".

--Garage were kept at bay and out back, sometimes attached without footers or foundation walls

--Somehow folks had happy lives without having to have so much "storage" for seasonal stuff and hobbies!

-They predate any codes - and some later upgraded with polyethylene plumbing, aluminum wires, unvented attics, if they do have stairs - there is someone who felt down them.

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Sometimes I hear "we don't build houses like we used too" ... and think thanks God.

Brian I think there's a huge difference between pre-war houses and post war houses which were put up quickly by production builders to house returning servicemen and their families.

Jillius, I agree mostly. However I think up until Victorian times houses definitely had public, and private areas. However starting in the early 1900's there came the bungalow, craftsman and prairie style houses where rooms were more "open". In some ways they were precursors to today's open floorplans as rooms were more open to one another, and hallways were minimized. This was when FLW flourished.

Additionally around the time of the Victorians, ceilings got taller. 9-10' ceilings were common and even during the bungalow/craftsman era, 9' ceilings were not unheard of.

Some construction is better than ever, but that's a technology thing not a design thing.

The ranch, or that form of one story semi-open plan that often integrated some outdoor space with the indoor living space through increased access is probably the last "new" form developed and widely adopted in the United States. I think this style has a lot going for it.