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Monster houses sprout like mushrooms
By LEE KUCERA
We live in one of those Cupertino neighborhoods of three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch homes that were built on generous lots in the postwar housing boom of the late '50s. The original tract designs were inadequate (by today's standards) for growing families, and most of them have been upgraded with second stories or other additions. The upgrades have erased the cookie-cutter sameness of the houses, the trees have grown up, and the neighborhood has a homey, well-established, lived-in feel. It's a place where kids ride their bikes and play hopscotch in the courts.
On a corner lot a few blocks away, the original, 40-year-old house has been bulldozed to the ground, and a 5,000-square-foot, two-story mansion is under construction. It is crammed into every available inch of the now-naked lot, leaving no room for trees or landscaping. It's not an ugly structure. If it were transported to a five-acre hilltop somewhere, it might be regal. Within the context of ordinary suburban homes and yards, it is ludicrous. Any potential beauty of the architecture is lost because its setting is so inappropriate.
These incongruous monster houses are sprouting up like mushrooms throughout the older neighborhoods in Cupertino: six- or seven-bedroom structures with no surrounding land, front entryways two-and-a-half stories high, mullioned windows, gables galore, roof lines with half a dozen angles. Some of them are startlingly finished off with towers and turrets that a decade ago wouldn't have been seen outside the Loire Valley--or Disneyland. They're BIG. And many existing neighbors are not happy about it.
The city of Cupertino has been dithering around for two years trying to come up with guidelines for building new houses in old developments that will satisfy both the existing residents' objections and the new buyers' individual property rights. It's easy to deride "Taco Bells on steroids," but hard to define exactly the problem. Are these enormous dwellings offensive because they're too big and they dwarf the surrounding houses? Too tall, so that their upstairs windows look directly into the neighbors' backyards and infringe on their privacy? Too close to the property lines? Too "tasteless"? Too pink?
A case could probably be made for all of the above; but the real problem with constructing these extravagant homes in the middle of suburban soccer neighborhoods is that all sense of proportion has vanished as a consequence of unbridled greed. There is, obviously, in these mammoth new structures a jarring lack of proportion--between house and lot size, between livable space and sheer ostentation, between older, 2,500-square-foot homes and mint-new mansions that look like the one Scarlett O'Hara built in Atlanta. But it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the fact that people are using the wildly inflated value of Cupertino land for little more than real-estate profiteering. It's simple arithmetic: buy a 40-year-old ranch home for under $400,000 (if you're lucky). Demolish it and build a monster home from the ground up. Sell it a few years later for $1 million. That's a quicker, higher profit than you can make on Wall Street.
To me, the word neighborhood means community, not land speculation. It means a place where people raise their families together. And I am sorry to see the physical character of our neighborhoods radically altered--not gradually, with moderate upgrades over the natural evolution of time, but drastically, with an architectural meat cleaver impelled by big bucks.
Nobody will ever write a city ordinance that's capable of enforcing appropriateness, circumspection or common sense. But driving home past the looming 5,000-square-foot monstrosity that now glaringly dominates the neighborhood where we have lived for 20 years, I wonder if the builders of these residences know that David Packard lived most of his adult life in the same comfortable but unpretentious home in Los Altos Hills. Packard, who could have afforded to build another Taj Mahal if he had wanted, or give Bill Gates a run for his money as winner of the Most Preposterously Ostentatious Dwelling in the Western Hemisphere award, was a modest man. I have a feeling that he had the sense to realize, along with Forrest Gump's mother, that "there's only so much money anybody can use. After that it's just showing off."
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
