That is a top quality photo right there. Definitely appropriate for a $1.2 million listing. Maybe it was just the lighting. Let’s give them another chance…
Nope, it wasn’t just the lighting. Wait, has this home been on the market since January 2008?!? The listing history seems to show it just having been listed a few weeks ago. I guess rather than bothering to shoot new photos, they just scrounged up whatever random shots they had lying around?
That’s the only way I can really think to explain this terrible collection.
I mean, a few of them even have dueling MLS watermarks! So ridiculous.
I guess I am old fashioned, but when a real estate agent stands to earn take a $36,000 commission, I expect at least some effort on their part to make the home look good in the sales material.
Is that a creeper in the shadows on the bottom photo there?
@Frodo: I saw him too…
It’s really hard to tell what’s going on with this house, though I don’t think the photo image quality, i.e., the blurriness, is the only culprit.
In addition to that issue, someone has yet to learn that you need to stand with the light to your back rather than pointing the camera directly at the source. Want to take pictures of large windows? Do so when the sun’s on the opposite side of the house. Still too bright? Take some extra lighting with you to offset the glare. Just because things look right to your eye doesn’t mean they’ll look right on camera.
Also, try not to shoot “dead end” shots. Pics 3, 4, and 9 are examples. The spaces shown are relatively small and don’t include a “visual overspill” into the next space. These aren’t the worst shots ever – Pic 3 has some sky showing, Pic 4 has a limited outdoor view (though too much furniture makes it seem cramped despite this), and Pic 9 seems to indicate an open space to the right of the image. But all three pics also give off a claustrophobic “why would I want to be there” feel. There are homes that are exceedingly difficult to photograph, which is all the more reason to get someone with some photography experience to do the job. I think with a $36,000 paycheck awaiting you, investing in a photog ahead of time won’t be too much of a hardship.
Then again, there are homes with actual dead end spaces, ones that feel in real life the way these look in photos. (All the more reason to hire a pro.) These homes have no sense of “flow” connecting the spaces, at least the public areas, to one another. If that’s what you like, fine, but don’t go describing your 3000sqft as having “a nice flow through the inside/outside living areas” when mostly you just feel trapped, even in “your own private courtyard with sunken spa and natural rock waterfall with lush landscaping.”
@Emerald63: You’re speaking my language, Em. I’m not an Eastern mystic by any stretch, but there’s a logic to the principle of chi as it applies to living spaces in feng shui that I appreciate. Even when you have more intimate spaces, like a breakfast nook, office, or sitting room, it’s much better if they are part of a continuous whole rather than being cut off from the rest of the house by a single entrance.
@Frodo: Thanks, Frodo. I’ve always been perplexed by the floorplans of homes from the Victorian era up through, say, the 1940s. There are multiple rooms but none of them flow into one another. I know purposefully pursuing that as a design philosophy only became really popular in the last few decades, but I’m talking about any connectedness at all. The kitchen is a room with a door on it and is only for cooking. You have to go into another room to eat the meal you’ve cooked. Those waiting for their meal can’t talk with the person preparing it. Storage for clothing and linens are separate from the bedrooms they’re used in. It’s hard to explain in words, but looking at period floor plans shows the phenomenon all too well.
I think it must stem from an era when anyone who could afford it had at least one servant and those who were richer had multiple servants. You certainly didn’t want to have to view them doing their jobs, let alone speak with them, and you didn’t want them eavesdropping or feeling like part of the family. The unfortunate side effect is that this system also ended up isolating family members from one another. Oops.
@Emerald63: I think servants are part of it; another part is HVAC; heating, ventilating and air conditioning, all of which changed drastically after WW2 as coal and wood heat went out, gas and electric came in, central heating became practical, electric fans became common, and air conditioning got installed.
In extremes of weather, you had to be able to adjust the “pre-convenient” house to compensate for the weather. So in cold weather, north-facing rooms could be abandoned and the doors kept closed to keep the rest of the house warmer. In hot weather you could close off the rooms with sun exposure.
It was very common in two-story houses in the pre WW1 south to have multiple doors into nearly all upstairs rooms, including bathrooms, so that you could get a cross-flow of air for ventilation with almost any wind direction.
Particularly in rural areas it was common for the kitchen to be built as an extension of the house to the outside of the back wall. The farmhouse my great grandfather built was arranged that way. The purpose of this was to make it easier to ventilate the kitchen and keep the heat and smoke from the (often coal-fired) stove out of the house in hot weather. So you only had one door between the kitchen and the rest of the house (plus another to outside), but a large number of opening outside windows.
We build houses to accommodate the peculiarities of our culture, then immediately begin adapting our culture to the design of the house. This process never really ends and the original quirks of the culture get hidden “beneath the floorboards,” so to speak, screwing up smart design nearly forever.
@Paradox: You have some good thoughts there. Growing up in the Midwest before insulation was a big thing, I remember some people closing off portions of the house to save on heating fuel. The other side of our duplex had a door on the staircase since that side only had one furnace. Registers delivered heat to specific parts of the upstairs. When we broke through and combined both sides of the house, we made openings in both the front and the back of the house that made the whole downstairs flow.
The old farm house where my mom grew up once had a detached kitchen. My grandparents built the bathroom between the kitchen and the rest of the house when they could afford a proper septic system (I remember the old outhouse) and moved the kitchen into the main house turning the old kitchen into a master bedroom.
@Paradox: Of course you’re right – no forced air or the like and no AC required different design strategies. I don’t even watch Downton Abbey and yet my mind somehow went to that Upstairs/Downstairs view of Us vs Them. Go figure.
The business of shutting off north side rooms in the winter and south side rooms in the summer is almost like a form of primitive passive solar design. Other design features in the pre-WWI South included raising the main floor up to several feet off the ground to allow air to circulate underneath and help carry away heat. (Also handy during floods.) Most homes had some sort of porch running at least the width of the house and those with the money would build wrap-around porches on all sides, including on the second story if there was one. Inside, many southern homes had high ceilings, transom windows, and a central stair hall that ran the full depth of the building. The same central hall was repeated upstairs. This acted like a breezeway, drawing in even a slight stir of air and allowing it to go through the house, adding to any cooling effect.
The practice of “popping out” the kitchen as an extension with 3 exterior walls, was not just for better ventilation and cooling. It was also to help prevent fire from spreading. In still earlier times, kitchens were built in entirely separate buildings specifically to protect the main home from fire. If the servants (or slaves) had to schlep a bunch of heavy trays into the house – even in rain or freezing temps – that was their problem. Fortunately, that example of “man’s inhumanity to man” has pretty much bit the dust in modern America.
@Frodo: Speaking of old farm houses, a log cabin dating from the second half of the 19th century, which some of my ancestors “borrowed” when they first moved to this country, was rebuilt some years ago on the grounds of the Arkansas Post Museum. It’s the featured header image here: http://www.arkansasstateparks.com/arkansaspostmuseum/. You can see the full length porches on two sides, but you can’t see the open-air breezeway, the poor-man’s version of the stair hall I mentioned to Paradox. If memory serves, there are two rooms on either side of the breezeway.
Strangely, though, the house my grandfather built in the mid-1920s, about 5 miles north of there and in town, has a completely different type of layout. The rooms flow one into the next with an overall circular traffic flow. From the family entrance in the rear it goes from kitchen to the “breakfast room,” then continuing on to the dining room. The latter two both let onto the living room, from which a door on the opposite wall leads to a short hall, with a bedroom at either end and a bathroom in the middle. There’s another door from the master bedroom into a second short hallway leading past the stairs and back into the kitchen. All rooms have exterior walls, with the center of the house comprised of a walk-in closet for the master bedroom and the enclosed stair up to the attic and my uncle’s boyhood bedroom. As many vacations as I spent there, I don’t ever recall anyone coming to the front door, perhaps because it seemed intrusive to first go through the enclosed porch or maybe just because the town never had more than 2000 people even at its largest. :)