Love it or hate it, the modern farmhouse is millennials’ answer to the baby boomers’ McMansion.
This post-agricultural style is the style that defines the current era – it dominates renovations, new construction and subdivisions in communities that have no connection to agriculture, with open-plan interiors, wooden floors wide wood slats, lots of shiplap, and kitchens with apron sinks and floating shelves made from reclaimed wood. Even the collective housing is treated like modern farmhouses, in the category of barndos, with vertical cladding, gables and tin roofs, giving a folkloric touch to the apartment complexes.
In May, wallpaper designer Hovia said modern farmhouse was the most popular interior design style in the country, a sentiment shared by architects, designers and home builders who say they regularly receive requests from eager customers to achieve a clean look with a neutral palette that manages to be both traditional and contemporary.
“At the end of the day, they’re very classic materials,” says Leanne Ford, an interior designer who hosted two HGTV shows with her brother and is known for her affinity for white on white.
Put it all together and you get an aesthetic that seems to be ubiquitous, as homes of all kinds — a two-story ranch, a cubicle-style home, a craftsman bungalow — regularly get the modern farmhouse treatment.
In 2020, when Lauren and Jeffrey Sachs decided it was time to leave Manhattan for the suburbs, they landed in a 4,500-square-foot modern farmhouse on a leafy street of colonial homes in Verona, New Jersey. In its previous life, the house had been a modest two-bedroom dwelling with cedar shingles and black shutters. But the previous owners demolished it, leaving only one wall, and reinvented it to make it an archetype of the modern farmhouse.
“I knew exactly what I wanted,” says Sonia Sun, 48, the former owner who led the two-year renovation, drawing ideas from her Google searches and design magazines. “I wanted something that fit in with the neighborhood. »
But when the work was completed and the house was habitable, his children had “integrated” into the town where they lived during the renovation, and so they remained in Morris County, in a colonial-style house. six-bedroom artisan home. If she were to one day bring the house up to date, she would give it the shape of a modern farmhouse. “Studio McGee is 100 percent safe,” she says, referring to the famous design firm. “I love her, as does Joanna Gaines. »
The modern farmhouse, a contemporary style that closely resembles a traditional farmhouse, entered the American lexicon 10 years ago with Fixer Upper, the HGTV sensation that catapulted hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines, on the national stage and persuaded homeowners to decorate their walls with enormous clocks and word art proclaiming the banality – Family! Eat ! Coffee !
The Gaineses made Waco, Texas, an unlikely design destination, bringing the city’s old farmhouses into the modern era, stripping away floral wallpaper to reveal virgin decline, the most basic building material reinvented as a main attraction.
It didn’t take long for the style to invade contemporary homes and consume Instagram feeds, with kitchens bathed in white shaker cabinets and heavily grained countertops becoming the norm. The look has evolved, led by a new generation of famous designers with their own home improvement shows and furniture collections, like Shea McGee of Studio McGee, who whitewashed the brick and embraced blonde, beige and wicker.
Pottery Barn Kids has a modern farmhouse look crib on sale for US$600, and Home Depot is selling a modern outdoor playhouse for US$299. At Jessica Cloe Miniatures, the six-piece modern dollhouse kit with board and batten siding is out of stock, but you can still purchase rustic side tables, bathtubs, and small wooden trays. Even Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian took inspiration from this vibe for the exteriors of the side-by-side mansions they built in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Lauren Sachs, 32, a stay-at-home mom, and her husband, 36, a commercial finance company owner, doubled the size of their modern farmhouse shortly after moving into the $1.3 million abode . They added a brick walkway and cedar posts and beams to the porch. They replaced the garage doors with porte-cocheres. After spotting a tin roof on a cottage in the Hamptons, the owner installed one on her house. “Honestly, I thought it was chic,” she says, leaning on her kitchen’s granite island on a sunny afternoon. For her, mid-century modern is too cold, and the Italianate style she grew up with is too ornate and uncomfortable. On the other hand, she feels at home in a modern farmhouse. “I feel like it’s a very evolving style,” she says. It never goes out of style. »
Fans of this style often describe it as classic and timeless, but architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange disagrees. “It’s actually modernism in disguise,” she says of a style that manages to hide modernist elements – large open windows and open floor plans – behind comfort features like gables and covered porches. Americans are drawn to the style, she says, because it has all the trappings of modernism without looking particularly modern. “Americans don’t really feel comfortable buying modern homes,” she says. It is an architecture of the rich. »
Thomas Mellins, architectural historian and curator of the House exhibition
Take the example of the McMansion house, the ultimate ode to excess, often derided for its poorly designed turrets, arches, columns and gables. This style dominated the early 2000s, when Americans embarked on a housing frenzy fueled by the reckless lending practices of banks that made subprime mortgages. When the market collapsed in 2008, the McMansion collapsed with it. The two-story ranch had its heyday in the post-war era, when Americans were so in love with their cars that they found ways to fit them inside.
“There is an American fetish for folklore and rural life, and the nostalgia for rural life is reflected in the modern farmhouse. “, explains Kate Wagner, creator of the McMansion Hell blog.
Ari Katz and Shari Sperling were so inspired by country living that they decided to bring it to their suburban neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey, a five-minute drive from the Sachs home. “If I wasn’t Jewish, I’d probably live in Montana,” said Ari Katz, who is Orthodox and therefore lives near his synagogue. “So I’m trying to bring Montana here, I’m trying to do my part to bring the West here. That was really our goal with this house. »
Mr. Katz, 42, and his wife, 43, spent half of 2021 and about $750,000 renovating their two-story ranch, adding a floor and giving the exterior the treatment complete with a modern farmhouse, with white board and batten siding, black framed windows, stone foundations and four wooden columns made from Western Red Cedar, the official tree of British Columbia. The couple recently sold their dermatology practice, where Shari is the dermatologist and Ari is the general manager.
Sit in a black Adirondack chair on the porch and the smell of fresh cedar is inescapable. When the wood arrived from Canada, “it literally smelled like a national park,” Ari Katz said, looking out at the elementary school across the street on a drizzly morning. During the long construction period, he chanced upon a cast-iron bison in a Manhattan antique store. He bought it, named it Monty and it now sits on the porch.
The modern farm has its detractors. Kathryn Grabowski-Khairullah is one of them. In 2021, she purchased her first home in nearby Detroit and was quickly bombarded with rustic decor options. “At first I was a victim of some of them,” she said. There was a lot of pressure to change everything and conform everything to that style because that was all I saw. »
It didn’t take long for Ms. Grabowski-Khairullah, 34, who works in administration in the arts, to rebel against what she saw as interior design’s answer to fast fashion – a style that seemed cheap, redundant and soulless. “Everything was devoid of color,” she says. Everyone had to have white shaker cabinets, everyone had to have white tile and only white tile, everyone had to have a giant hood over the stove. »
Looking for a place to sympathize, she started a Facebook group, “The People Against Modern Farmhouse,” which quickly amassed 165,000 members who posted memes and photos ready to be ridiculed. “Most of the group was waiting for it to go away,” said Ms. Grabowski-Khairullah, who ultimately settled on her own aesthetic, a sort of Golden Girls revival. “It’s so kitsch it’s ridiculous,” she says of her 1980s furniture, most of which she found on Marketplace. “Everything is made of shells, bows and roses. »
But for fans of the modern farmhouse, the minimalist palette is the whole point. “I’m not a big fan of color, so you won’t see a lot of color in my house,” says Jeniffer Diaz, who spent three years removing the orange, pink and brown from her ranch-style home in Palmetto Bay, a suburb of Miami. “That’s my mindset. »
The house, which dates to 1977, had vaulted ceilings with wood beams and tile floors when she bought it. Ms. Diaz, 31, a stay-at-home mom, and Manny Diaz, 30, a trucking company owner, spent about $200,000 renovating the home they bought in 2020 for $560,000. They replaced the beige, green and stone facade with white stucco and concrete siding and replaced the shingle roof with a metal roof.
Inside, they painted the wooden slatted ceiling white and the beams black. They completely renovated the bathrooms, replacing the pink vanity with scalloped sinks with a white vanity with brass hardware. The kitchen now features black cabinets, white appliances and open wooden shelving. “Pinterest is my best friend,” said Jeniffer Diaz.
The result is a house that may date from the middle of the last century, but when you walk inside you immediately know you are in the house of the moment.
