As regular readers might have guessed, I'm not a big fan of new homes. I feel uncomfortable in new buildings of all types - offices, stores, and especially houses. Growing up in Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s, I never even guessed that such things as sprawling suburban development even existed - I had very little contact with the kinds of people who lived in such places. To me, then and now, there was something stifling and unnatural about living in a space that had not evolved, and while certainly the idea of building my own home some day has its attraction, I cannot honestly say that I would feel comfortable in a place without its own history.
Thus, it is with conflicted feelings that I read an email telling me about Atlanta's Hawthorn Park development. Part of that city's Kirkwood neighborhood (which itself was originally established in 1899), Hawhtorn Park is a 2003 development where the home plans are based on traditional (but slightly larger) Craftsman plans. Certainly this is not new; developers want to make money, and ever since the Craftsman revival of the early '90s homebuilders have been offering Craftsman plans and even a few large(er)-scale developments like this have been built. All of the homes in the Hawthorn Park development sold out quite quickly after the initial offer in 2003, and many of them seem to be complete and lived-in at the present time. read on...