I fell for the romance of my front porch instantly. I drank it in like a glass of sweet tea.
It’s a long, covered front porch, the kind I remember from growing up in the Southeast. When I first saw it two years ago, I imagined visiting with the neighbors who would bring cupcakes to welcome me when I moved in. I visualized my dog snoozing by the glider while I smiled at passers-by.
My porch would be a prop in a Country Time Lemonade commercial, starring me.
That fantasy hasn’t yet played out. It’s hard to be chipper to passers-by when bloodthirsty mosquitoes are ceaselessly pelting you. My dog didn’t doze lazily by the glider, but lunged at other neighborhood canines walking past her territory. No one brought me cupcakes. I retreated inside.
Many of us have misty fantasies about porches. We associate them with beach houses, fishing cabins or mountain cottages from vacations past.
Or, we connect them with childhood memories of idyllic places, such as our grandparents’ homes. In those days, almost every home had a porch. Before air conditioning, it was a place to escape the heat of a stuffy house and, often, a breezier place to sleep. Back then, the porch was also a way to keep tabs on the street, a precursor to the modern neighborhood watch.
The New Urbanism design movement that began in the 1980s as a reaction to urban sprawl revived the concept of the porch, but mostly in its romantic ideal.
The power of the porch is well known in real estate circles. A front porch gives a house a friendly posture, like a dog wagging its tail. It contributes to the where-do-I-sign effect known as curb appeal.
Often, builders tack them on as an aesthetic afterthought and buyers consider them a must-have luxury with little consideration for their function.
It is a pet peeve of Austin architect Kevin Alter that porches are so often associated with the quaintness of traditional design. Southern Living illusions like the one I harbored about my porch are so commonplace that most modernists shy away from the porch as an architectural element altogether.
“My critique is that (New Urbanism) is holding out a romantic image of the past that never existed anyway,” Alter says.
But some porches have been reinvented for the modern existence, for the busy family that craves privacy and community. They are for people who want the fresh air without the gardening.
Spring catalogs from stores such as Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel overflow with the trappings of porches, which are being reinvented too. These porches have more than rocking chairs; they have their own category of home decor. With couches, bars, dining tables, shades, fans, lamps and wall art, they are livable retreats. Most important, they are screened.
Screens provide more than the obvious protection from mosquitoes and rain. When we are reluctant to live up to the friendly role our porches demand, a screen provides a tangible boundary that can make being out in public more comfortable, says architect Paul Lamb. Like a veil, a screen filters the outside world without completely blocking it.
Some people eschew screens, preferring a clear view and an unobstructed social connection with the community. But others consider a screened-in porch a nice compromise between the fiction of the lemonade commercial and the reality of daily life.
Lamb recently completed a screened-in porch for clients in Hyde Park, Texas, who loved the outdoors but were seeking refuge from the neighborhood’s notorious mosquitoes. He built the porch on the southeastern side of the house to take advantage of prevailing breezes and to keep the owners well connected to activity on the sidewalk.
“It exposes them to the street in a nice, old-fashioned way. They can nod without having to engage the neighbors fully,” Lamb says.
Marjorie and Stephen Moore built a porch addition to their 1920s bungalow in Clarksville, Texas, three years ago. The porch is on the second level of an addition joined to the main house by a catwalk. It stays pleasant during hot summer days because two of the walls are made of Galvalume, a metal material that reflects heat out.
It is a modest space that holds only an Ikea dining table and chairs, a grill and a large contemporary sculpture, but it has completely changed the way they use the house, Marjorie says. Now they are more efficient with their air conditioning, eat most of their meals in the fresh air and enjoy watching the evening sunsets without the company of mosquitoes.
Peggy Weiss of Austin, Texas, built her screened-in porch six years ago so she and her husband could spend more time just sitting. Weiss drinks her morning coffee and her evening wine there.
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“It’s been good for our nervous system. There’s no TV … we don’t even have music out there,” she says.
The porch is set back from the street enough to observe others but not so close as to invite them to intrude. It is the kind of porch you could picture on the cover of Veranda magazine. In fact, it is based on a porch that graced the cover of Architectural Digest years ago.
The floor is hand-laid limestone and brick. The tall screens are floor-to-ceiling; the roof is tin. A wooden bird sculpture hangs from the ceiling and two old Oriental rugs have been sacrificed to the elements. Some of the furniture is covered in Sunbrella outdoor fabric, but in a heavy rain, stuff gets wet.
Aesthetically, her porch fits the romantic ideal. Functionally, it fills a void. In our modern day, that void might be less about being disconnected from our neighbors than about being disconnected from members of our family.
“The children love it. It’s one of the few places we can get our 19-year-old son to sit and have a conversation with us,” Weiss says.