A Behind the Scenes Look at Designing a Home for Today’s Buyers

Q&A With Wendy Welton, Architect for Holly Glen

We got down to the nuts and bolts, or rather the sills and crown moldings, behind the Holly Glen home development with architect, Wendy Welton. Wendy describes her passion of architecture as part science, part art and part craft. We think her part in creating the homes at Holly Glen is second to none.

Hear what she has to say first-hand about what it takes to design 32 single-family homes, and how each home evolves and grows from the inside out.

Tell us a little bit about your background – what types of projects are your specialty?

I. Love. Houses. My father was a carpenter, and when I was growing up he taught me to draw houses on graph paper when I was 8. You could say that’s when I started building ideas about what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I graduated from Pratt Institute in New York, and I’m licensed to practice architecture in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

Often architectural school prepares you for commercial building, but designing residential homes has always been my passion. I moved to New Hampshire in 2000, founded Art Form Architecture, Inc. in 2001 to follow my passion, and I haven’t looked back since.

What was it about the Holly Glen project that interested you?

I have worked with Symes Associates on a few developments in the past and they introduced me to this project. Symes is a fantastic organization. They brought me in right from the beginning, which can be a rarity in this business. Many developers are focused on profit margin – which is why you often see the same home design row after row in many housing developments.

But because I was involved from the beginning, I was able to work directly with the site engineer to tweak the layout of the homes. We want the neighborhood to look like it grew over time - not like a cookie-cutter development. So, one of our goals is visual variety. There are eight different home designs, each with their own style and personality.

How will you approach the homes at Holly Glen?

All buyers are not created equal, so every home must be a little bit different to accommodate a range of needs.  It’s not like the first Model T Ford coming off the assembly line and they said, “You can have any color you want….Black.”

Holly Glen offers people choice, but they don't have to start with a scary piece of blank white paper, which can be overwhelming.

Late last year we conducted a focus group made up of people from Arlington, Lexington, Winchester, Belmont, Concord and nearby areas, and it revealed a number of interesting style preferences which allowed us to fine-tune the homes to meet buyer’s needs.

For example, we learned that the first-floor master bedroom suite was an absolute must-have. People want options with their living space – either for now or in the future, whether it’s for themselves or for visiting family – and a first- loor bedroom is clearly a feature people want. 

Nearly half the group said that a formal dining room was a must – you know, dinner with the boss. The other half didn’t, they wanted the kitchen to be the focal point, or ‘the new living room’ if you will. 

Some people want the living room in front of the house, some want it in the back adjacent to a back yard. Some people want the kitchen open to the rest of the house, some want to keep the mess of the kitchen out of sight from guests.

Have you heard of the snore room? This is a fantastic multipurpose room near the master suite which can act as a study, or a place where the nasal-challenged can go when their significant other just needs a good night’s rest.

So you see there is no one formula. We are approaching Holly Glen as a community, not a development. With feedback from the focus group we are creating homes that are directly aligned with the expectations of today’s buyers.

Tell us a little bit about the Craftsman Bungalow-style home.

To be honest, the word ‘Craftsman’ is overused in the industry. These days almost anything can be ‘Craftsman.’ My designs are a modern variation on the Craftsman that has evolved into its own style.  These homes have one foot in Craftsman, one in the 1920s, and one in the present with open floor plans and other modern features.

We are taking elements that have appealed to people throughout the years and we're reinterpreting them and putting them together in a way that is new and beautiful – so when you drive home after a long day, you see your gorgeous home and your heart sings.

These homes have all the bells and whistles of today – hardwood floors, granite counter-tops, great storage, open floor plans, high ceilings, and first-floor master bedroom suites.  The detailing combines clean lines with traditional elements, like Craftsman.

Let’s face it, if a home was just a place to functionally meet your needs we’d all live in a cinderblock box – and we certainly wouldn’t have crown molding.

Tell us a little more specifically about one of the homes of Holly Glen, The Lanark.

First, the home names all come from interesting places in Scotland. I like names that sound like poetry.  And I believe Lanark in Scotland is a small, tight-knit community – which supports our concept.

Next, the footprint of each home must accommodate the piece of land on which it sits, and the rest of the house gets sculpted from there.

We have a certain benchmark all these homes meet – like the 9 foot first floor ceilings.  The floor plans were studied for proportion as well as just layout.  We look at where the light is coming in at various times of day, what you can see from each room, how you will move through a space and the proportions of individual rooms.  It’s not enough to just have big rooms.  You need them to have flow and light and to accommodate realistic furniture placement.

Then each design has its special features.  The Lanark is for folks who cook and entertain.  The kitchen is large and will be well-appointed.  There’s a walk-in Laundry/Pantry that’s large enough that you could put a sink and a second dishwasher.  The dining area will hold a 9 foot long table with ease, and is adjacent to a very large cathedral Great Room.  The bedrooms are large, and the upstairs loft is huge, big enough to hold a third large bedroom with its own bath.

So there’s room for the grown kids and their spouses and the grandkids. Because there’s also a study on the first floor, the upstairs can be dedicated to your overnight company.

In The Lanark, as with all of the homes, I studied the proportions very  carefully during design. When people like one house better than another, they don’t always know why.  They can seem similar, and yet one just looks better. It’s the proportions, and I sweat the proportions.  I study everything from roof pitches to window sizes and placements to the trim elements. 

For instance, in the Lanark the first floor front windows are very high in the wall, with the tops at 7’-8”, both for the look and to give privacy.  The roof shape, as with all these homes, was designed to both give street presence and provide a pleasing view from the rear of the home.

There are just so many great features that make each one of these homes unique and unlike anything else.  People ask me what “style” applies to my designs.  I would have to say the ‘Wendy-neo-vernacular- whimsical-eclectic,’ but it was too long to fit on a name-plate.  So we just call the homes by their names.

If you had to tell a friend about Holly Glen, how would you describe it in a word (or twenty)?

• Community.
• Interesting.
• Non-linear.
• Relaxed upscale.
• Not rigidly formulaic or symmetrical, but proportionate.
• There is variety, but it all works together. Like a family.