Tasteful Friends: Please help me express what I'm thinking about this place

Here's the Zillow listing with more pictures. It makes the layout seem more confusing. What is it with all of the cut-outs at near the ceiling at the edge of rooms?

It looks like an '80s chain restaurant based in Kansas City threw up in that place.

It's very much a custom home. I don't love it but I like how it's not a plain white box or a mini French chateau. I like the pool/jacuzzi.

How can anything in Sacramento be over three million?

Including the Governor's Mansion?

I wouldn't pay more than half a million to live in Sacramento. Summers are unbearably hot. It doesn't cool down at night. It's flat. At least this house has a pool.

The house's flood risk is rated as 'severe'.

It's high-end 1980s. The kitchen was fabulous at the time, today the separate-tile counters are horrible. Too much light oak everywhere.

I think the term you’re looking for is “funeral home”.

Why does it seem that nearly every California house I look at has tile counter tops? Wake up California there is such a thing as hard surface counter tops that are better looking, more sanitary and don't crack, chip or have grout lines.

I love the craftsman style exterior. It's really disappointing to me that the interior is so completely styleless and bland. I mean I get it, an authentic period arts and crafts look can seem overdone and oppressive. But my God this is the architctural equivalent of Ensure.

I won't comment on the interior, which while very dated can easily be updated (start by ripping off that wallpaper!).

The rear exterior elevation is very nice, almost a "Craftsman by Frank Lloyd Wright" feel to it. But the front elevation is hideous, with the double car garage as the focal point and made worse with the addition of a second storey above it.

Tile counter kitchens are never used for cooking. The cheap looking cool cooktop looks very out of place.

I like the mini-office room because it has grasscloth wallpaper (my favorite).

The apt over the garage for the nanny or staff: Sure, spend thousands on custom stuff for your house but use Home Depot for that.

So very brown.

[quote]Tasteful Friends: Please help me express what I'm thinking about this place

Bring your own fucking opinion, OP. Tasteful Friends are not a suitable and affirming support group for people who can't formulate an opinion.

The interior is the perfect match to this Wannabee Woodsy Japanese Ranch House exterior, as timid as your dithering opinion. It looks like exactly what it is, a horizontally spacious arrangement of squat rectangles and an anti-bouffant manifesto of criminally low ceilings. A white bread dream of white sheet rock and orange tabby cat stained trim. It's a great big boring series of Home Depot vignettes.

There's nothing there that's good or bad enough to inspire much love or hate. It's just a big roided out expensive ranch house that doesn't even aspire to something better (or worse.)

Ugly furniture. Worse wallpaper. Ancient tile in the kitchen with probably filthy grout.

It would make an excellent retirement home for the elderly, or you could use it yourself if you were a 75-year-old woman who likes to have the grandkids over. There is even enough room for the daughter to have when she leaves her husband.

[quote]What is it with all of the cut-outs at near the ceiling at the edge of rooms?

It was an 80s fad. My mother's house was built in '87 with these high vaulted ceilings open above interior walls supposedly for air circulation which as far as I could tell did not help, but the cat loved it and was forever driving my mother crazy walking along and making improbable leaps from one section to another. Mom's house was difficult to keep warm or cool, and she hated running ceiling fans which was pretty much the solution to the problem the high ceilings and wide open airflow caused.

Regarding this house, it looks like another example of too much money and too little taste. There's nothing wrong with wooden (Craftsman-inspired; this is not authentic) interiors, but mixing various woods of too numerous shades and finishes is just poor planning and execution. The vibe I'm getting is that the house was built for and owned by a divorced man whose new girlfriend "decorated" the space 40 years ago, and he only maintained — but never improved — the space.

OP what is so confusing? It's a nice house from the 1980s. It includes a lot of pleasant wood finishes. Dont make a mountain out of a molehill for crissakes.

What feels off is that it should be decorated with a combo of Craftsman and Modern Spanish Revival/ California Casual and instead it's that stuffy Tuscan/Neoclassical slop that peaked in the early 2000s. They used giant furniture to try to accommodate the giant rooms when really they should have broken the rooms up into smaller sections. The carpeting absolutely needs to go as does the wallpaper--it's just not ugly paper, just the wrong house for it.

It's very beige and brown.

[QUOTE]Bring your own fucking opinion, OP.

You obviously failed to perceive my emphatic my opinions, plural. Why, r15? Does your practiced "crustiness" deliberately occlude your vision and reading ability?

Or is that a tactic?

Personality disordered folks such as yourself have littered pasts and questionable histories. Best to stay away from real estate transactions from your type.

I think those "cut outs" are supposed to let natural light in where perhaps there wouldn't be otherwise. The birdbath and all of the wallpaper have to go, and the kitchen and bathrooms need to be . . . plainer.

I worked for various non-profits in the 1980s. When they had the money for staff retreats, OP’s house was exactly the sort of place they’d book. For those of us prone to depression, those surroundings exacerbated it.

What's so complicated about staying an opinion? Or creating a post? No matter how fucking wacky or sage the opinion, some posters will agree and others will take issue.

And there's no need to ask permission or seek a consensus. "Is it okay if I start a thread about..."??? Evidently yes, because in meekly asking for permission a thread has already been created and opinions ventured. As it should be.

Not every Tasteful Friends house has to the most superlative best house or the most hysterically bad, most horriblest worst house.

Could somebody please wade through the tedium and superlatives in r25's last sentence and translate, please?

It looks like that kitchen should come with a salad bar.

It looks like a disguised stockade used by an archdiocese to keep the worst of its clergy locked up.

I guess there's a good reason why no floor plan accompanies the listing.