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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never adapt to new needs.

That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house.

On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace.

There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.

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Dude, there's no way Heinlein designed a house like that. The value and importance of standardized, easily-replaceable parts is a plot point in his book, The Door into Summer

(BTW, I strongly recommend everyone here read it. The main character is an engineer, and it's shocking how insightful and relevant you'll still find his observations about businesses and the way engineering is done, 61 years after the book was first published)

Heinlein was full of contradictions. Look at the built-in furniture: there's no way to change it if you discover it doesn't work for you, other than by ripping it out and redoing the walls. That's not modular or replaceable. The rolling table between the kitchen and dining room is unnecessary for one person, great for two, and inconveniently small for four.

And yes, Heinlein designed it.

The two volume biography by Patterson is completely uncritical and at times fanboyish, but it seems to have the facts straight.

It’s refreshing, in contrast to today’s beige cookie-cutter McMansions that check off generic “typical vanilla homeowner” needs but have no soul or uniqueness in form or function.

Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck!

It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!

What makes it worse is that everyone with children will have to go for the high-ceiling box with open floorplan because everything else comes with intolerable schools.

It's exactly like highly optimized code.

Very efficient for today's requirements but complex, calcified, and difficult to adapt when requirements change.

One story houses are not inherently that expensive to modify. At 1150 SF they could probably replace it every 15 years for less than many modern 5000+ SF houses.

Sure, some houses take 5+ years to build others take 5 days once you have a foundation.

Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally.

If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth.

I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power:

  - high ceilings
  - open floor plan
  - generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens)
  - light (and air) from the outside
  - durable water-tight construction
  - no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare)
  - a good view
  - land

These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great.

My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.

I'm not saying you're wrong to hold this list of desired attributes, but the short of it is that houses are generally built the way they are to satisfy demand at the lowest possible construction cost. When you consider the average time people stay in a given home is only about 7 years, durability doesn't carry particularly much sway.

FWIW, the reason there are so many crappy houses in the Bay Area is that the climate is so mild that even the most poorly constructed shacks have staying power... and with the cost of remodeling/construction here, there isn't much incentive to rebuild unless you've got significant disposable income.

> [air] from the outside

That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house.

Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort.

On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air.

> ... water-tight construction

Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".

Good points, perhaps why the 300 year old house in the woods in New England I have stayed in occasionally has withstood the elements. Foot thick beams helped. And maybe there is some type of preservative in all the bat and mouse crap.

A recent stay in England has shown me you can have plenty of air circulation with no water intrusion, they have these wonderful skylights that you can keep cracked open even during a storm and no water gets in, I was pretty amazed.

I made the list not to condemn old houses, but to consider when building a new house. However, if you go to the downtown areas in old towns, the old commercial properties can tend to hit almost everything on the list. Apparently these things were known, just not applied to residential construction, probably because of cost.

Something like my circa 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s pretty typical hits about half the list but you’re starting from a place where rooms were small. I’ve opened up the first floor a lot but ceilings are still low and the renovated bathroom, which wouldn’t even have existed in the original house, is small. And it’s the only one in the house.

Damn right. Wood is the bane of the homeowner. I'm not much of a 'This Old House' guy, so I made masonry wall construction and a metal roof 'must haves' when I finally acquired a house.

Open floor plan only recently came back into style, after being out of style for a very long time, and it seems the reaction against it has already started.

Sartorially, black suits are for formal events or funerals. They look out of place in “professional” environments. Certainly not for a wedding, unless it is specifically black tie.

> Sartorially, black suits are for formal events or funerals. They look out of place in “professional” environments. Certainly not for a wedding, unless it is specifically black tie.

Depends on what part of the country you live in and the business/professional circles you move in. For many lawyers, a charcoal-gray suit (which is not quite the same as black, but close) is practically a uniform. I see them a lot at weddings even when it's not black-tie.

I didn’t say charcoal, I said black. It’s a rather big difference.

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