Hofmann Design Build Articles

DEMOLITION DERBY

For the moneyed homebuyer, a run-down house in the right location is no longer a fixer-upper. Now it's a target for the wrecking ball.

Anatomy of a demolition: The 1952 ranch in Short Hills [Top Left] came with pink aluminum cabinets and other such amenities that made it ripe for demolition [Bottom Left]. In its place stands a 6,300-square foot shingle-style house [Below], four times the size of the original.

When a house goes on the market, the owners usually prime things up for prospective buyers: They repaint walls, hide the burn spot on the linoleum with a throw rub, and if they're really going for the hard sell, pop an apple pie in the oven just before the real estate agent shows up. The Fussells of Watchung, though, have done none of this. When they put their home of 45 years on the market in December, they left for Florida. In their absence, their son, Craig, a burglar-alarm installer who lives in the home's basement apartment, gamely tries to interest prospective buyers in the fifties expanded ranch, but he knows this is futile. Some customers never even bother to step inside. Instead they walk around the property to stare at the incredible sight awaiting them in the backyard. From this vantage point, high on a ridge on Johnston Drive, they can see directly to the Manhattan skyline some 30 miles away and, turning slightly to the southeast, clear across to the Atlantic Highlands and the ocean beyond. It's the lot they're after, not the house. "Whoever buys this house isn't going to live in it", says Fussell, with resignation. "Instead, somebody's going to come in here and flatten it, then build a monster.

[Below] Its hillside locale makes the 45-year-old ranch a prime candidate for demolition.

In real estate terms, this is the age of the megahouse. The booming stock market and strong economy have made people richer than ever, and nowhere is this more evident than in the houses they build. But there's a problem in North Jersey: Very little land remains where the affluent want to live. Places like Short Hills, Summit, and Harding are all build to capacity. But when you want a 20,000-square-foot house costing $5 million --as someone recently built in Saddle River -- no fifties ranch is going to stand in your way. And thus a new world has found its way into New Jersey's real estate lexicon: the tear-down. "We see tear-downs more and more", says Jacelyn Botti, a regional vice president for Weichert Realtors. "In a lot of cases, the house is worth the same as the empty lot--less actually, because there can be some big costs involved in removing it. "Elsewhere on Johnston Drive in Watchung, says Weichert agent Helen Hebman, a house that sold for $290,000 was demolished, and in its place the new owners are building a home estimated to cost at least $800,000.

The latest housing trend is not limited to the super-rich. Direct train service to Manhattan, begun by NJ Transit in June 1996, has attracted to New Jersey's northern suburbs hordes of upper-middle-class commuters who otherwise might have settled in New York's Westchester County. "That train alone raised the price of the lot by $30,000 to $40,000 overnight," says Ernst Hofmann, of Hofmann Design Build in Summit. Because of the higher property values and increased competition for sales, many people now figure that it's worth spending $250,000 (or more) for a tiny house in a good neighborhood in a place like Madison or Summit just to raze it and start over -- getting the home of their dreams for a mere $600,000 or so. "We're starting to see that happen all over the place, " Hofmann says.

This concept of disposable houses might run contrary to most people's notions of home. Until now, a home has been not merely a place to live, but a solid investment -- something that will grow in value if it's maintained and steadily improved. The Fussell's house, for example, which listed at $585,000, is hardly a handyman's special. In the sixties the family nearly doubled the size of the house with a flat-roofed addition, then added amenities like cathedral ceilings and decks in the eighties. If the Fussell's house is indeed destroyed, its replacement could sell for $1 million or more -- the going rate for a high-end new construction on Johnston Drive. "Land is so valuable today", says Carol Mucerino, manager of Weichert Realtors in Summit. They are buying for location and property.

The same economics are working in Harding, where one of the few remaining empty lots might go for $850,000. "If you can find a house in Harding that you could buy for $850,000 or less, it would be worth it to just tear it down and start again", says Botti. John Scialli, a construction official from Saddle River, recalls a house that was sold in that borough for $1.2 million and subsequently demolished. "It happens all the time", he says. "But as a working person, this can be difficult to comprehend, let me tell you."

It can take some getting used to for the people summoning the wrecking crew as well. One couple who eventually bought and demolished a house in Short Hills searched in vain for a new house in which they could actually live. They looked at new houses, but none pleased them. "They were just too large and too ugly", says the woman, who asked not to be named. None of the old houses thrilled them either. "I set out hoping to find a nice center-hall colonial that maybe I could add a family room to and call it a day, but there was nothing." Then a real estate agent suggested they buy a smaller house on a desirable lot and simply tear it down. On a pretty street in a town, they found just such a house -- a 1952 ranch with downright scary amenities, like pink aluminum kitchen cabinets and a pink rotary telephone wired to the wall. Depending on your perspective, it needed either loads of work or, if you brought in a bulldozer, none at all. And although it might not have seemed like prime real estate, this was, after all, Short Hills. "I told the agent I'd bring my husband by that weekend, and she said, 'It'll be sold by this weekend,'" the woman recalls. So her husband arrived with the agent at six o'clock the next morning. "He didn't even go inside," she says. "He just walked around the edge of the property, and that was that.

The couple hired an architect to draw up plans for a shingle-style house that would come in at 6,300 square-feet -- nearly four times as large as the existing house, they turned it over to the local fire department to use as a training site for recruits. The firefighters filled the place with artificial smoke and practiced walking on the roof and punching holes through the ceilings. Then came the demolition squad; Hofmann says that a typical razing costs $15,000 to $20,000. After salvaging windows, doors, and even carpet, Bace Demolition of Florham Park moved in with an excavator equipped with a giant claw, which tore into the house piece by piece and laid it in a big pile off to the side. Laborers sorted out teh metal and masonry from the wood and sent it off for recycling, then carted away the wood. "They made the house look like a smear in the ground in three days," says Hofmann, whose company built the new house. "The whole thing -- down to the foundation and the footings -- was just gone." And in its place went the new, two story house.

While the demolition boom does reflect rising land values, it's also true that some houses make easy targets for the wrecking ball. Following World War II, the suburbs near New York exploded with tract houses that were built cheaply and fast to satisfy the demand of returning GIs and their baby-booming families. Until that point, houses had been built with great care -- from teh noble Greek Revivals of the early 1800s to the eclectic Arts and Crafts creations of the early 1900s. This tradition of finely crafted homes died in teh post-war suburbs, which became the domain of split-levels, expanded ranches, and other domestic specimens that often semm to possess all the soul of a mobile home, says William Kaufman, an architect from Liberty Corner. "Most houses built before World War II stand tall and proud, " Kaufman says. "But the ones built in the fifies and sixties look like somebody took a flyswater and pancaked them down; they're kind of hiding under a rock." While no one advocates ripping down a historic house or even something just delightfully old-fashioned, many houses from the fifties and sixties offer little to recommend saving them. "While they're basically sound structurally, they're really plain -- with hollow doors, low ceilings, and poor moldings. There's just nothing to work with," says Kaufman. Hofmann, as a builder, agrees. "What drives this whole thing is that people want to live in 5,000-square-foot houses. And when you're dealing with a 1,500-square-foot house, it's more expensive to try to add on to that than just tear it down and start over." he says. "There's an economy of scale that kicks in, and you don't have that with the constraints of an existing house."

Yet if these 40-year-old houses strike some as hideous, so too do many of the new ones. Just ask the angry neighbors when a mammoth mansion rises from the lot next door. Part of the problem is size: When building a house larger than 10,000 square feet, it's hard to be restrained and tasteful. This mania for the sort of home once reserved for the likes of William Randolph Hearst has provoked local governments to take action. In Saddle River, the borough passed an ordinance limiting square footage of a new house to 9 percent of its lot size for a ranch and 7 percent for a two-story structure. While this regulation may seem draconian, "you can still build a 14,000-square-foot house ona a 2-acre lot, "says borough construction official Scialli. "And that's what everybody's up to. They're all trying to outdo their neighbors with big houses."

Kaufman fears that many of these houses are being built with the same intesitivity to detail that characterized those built 40 or 50 years ago. "In some ways, it's the fifties all over again, only with much larger houses," he says. "In a few decades, the synthetic stucco will decay. These will be the tear-downs of tomorrow." As a remedy, Kaufman recommends that homeowners be careful about what they build, and make sure it blends into the existing neighborhood -- at least to some degree. Instead of demolishing a house, he likes to take a few ideas from what's already there. A 1954 ranch that he's working on in Short Hills is evoving steadily into a shingle-style palace -- complete with columns, porches, and barrel-vaulted ceilings in the family room. Rather than rip down the house, he enveloped the existing house within the new one.

"It's easy to be irresponsible and just start over from the beginning," Kaufman says. "But it's better to work with what you have, even if you end up changing it completely. The result wukk be a house that feels like it belongs in the neighborhood." Kaufman believes that the houses he's designing will last 100 years or more. But he can't say the same for a row of tidy, slate-roofed raised ranches from the fifties on a nearby street. "It feels starnge to say this, he says, with a wave from his hand. "But they'll all be gone."

So will Craig Fussell. He fondly remembers growing up in the fifties, when a neighbor was someone who would stop by to help you out with your chores, not someone who would try to out-build you. "The people around here live in movie-star houses," he says. "I couldn't afford to heat them, much less pay for them -- unless it was heated with wood stoves." After his parents' house gets plowed into the ground, he's planning to move to the Pennsylvania countryside, to some little town witha dirt road running through it -- and not a mansion in sight. "To tell you the truth, I can't wait, "says Fussell. "It's just getting too weird around here.