Peter Goers: Now the main feature of McMansions and townhouses is the garage

There’s a juvenile obesity crisis because kids don’t have backyards, but everyone has an en suite, writes Peter Goers.

If you are over 40, you were probably raised in a house in which your family shared one bathroom and one toilet. We managed.

You were raised in a “gloria soame” — villas, bungalows, maisonettes with two or three bedrooms, a dining room with a servery to the modest, laminex-covered kitchen, a toilet and laundry in a lean-to, a sleep-out, a gully trap by the back door, a rainwater tank on a concrete stand, a hall with a telephone on a telephone table, a front lawn, a silver birch and some oleanders and roses, a driveway with a strip of lawn down the middle, a garage for the family car, assorted sheds, a Hills hoist, chooks, fruit trees and an incinerator in the huge backyard.

Then everyone wanted an extension — a sun room, a rumpus room or a family room and domestic architecture super-sized.

Now families are smaller and the family room (now an entertainment complex) is much bigger. TV screens are much bigger. Houses are much bigger. Mortgages are much bigger. Backyards, once the place of juvenile adventure and discovery, are much smaller or non-existent. Maybe there’s a bit of plastic grass beyond the pergola.

Once a small house sat on a large block. Now the large house is all the block. Everyone must have an en suite. Kitchens were once adequate and most meals were prepared, cooked and eaten therein. Now kitchens are vast expanses of composite Chinese marble and people either make impossibly fancy meals or have food delivered. Lots of homes now feature a void. This is an architectural term for an empty space. Perhaps it’s where the family used to be.

Kids no longer have backyards to play in or the freedom to walk to school. Picture: iStock

There’s a juvenile obesity crisis because kids don’t have backyards in which to gambol and explore, and they are chauffeured to and from school. We sit in modern homes typing messages to “friends” we’ve never met and we don’t know our neighbours on the other side of very high charcoal-coloured side fences. There was great repetition in domestic architecture but my heart sings at the sight of a bluestone villa, a Californian bungalow and a freestone or tuck-pointed, cream-brick L-shaped domicile.

Now the main feature of McMansions and townhouses is the garage. It’s like those baboons with huge, swollen pink bums — that’s all you see. Then the garages are often not used for cars because they’re a storage unit full of stuff and because driveways are too short and front lawns too small, cars are parked on the street. Michael Tajnikar of beautiful downtown Surrey Downs has eloquently raised this point in a letter to The Advertiser. I hope he’s a town planner.

Councils and governments love urban infill — less public transport and infrastructure required. Four suburban blocks once netting a council $6000 in rates a year will net a council $400,000 in rates a year if it’s an apartment block. Urban infill requires better public transport and more trees and parks. Please.

We’re in the age of ephemeral furniture and ephemeral architecture. Norwood Mall, redeveloped 15 years ago, is being razed and redeveloped again. Contemporary houses may soon be replaced with something worse.

Change is the only constant apart from home. Home, en suite, home.

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights on ABC Radio Adelaide.