LIFE asked Stern, who has spent 30 years designing award-winning houses, to overcome this building block. The result is a house that's roomy, restful, handsome outside and inside, and easily adapted to your location by almost any architect. Precious space gets squandered on pompous entry halls and huge master baths meant to add glamour. It also possesses an old-time house's quality and detail.
Walls are twice as thick as in the majority of builder homes and finished off with cornices.
The outside of Robert A.M. Stern's handome design is cheerful, spirited and sturdy. Most of the architect's Shingle Style houses are rambling, many-roomed manors of up to 25,000 square feet. Here a homeowner is free to juggle the number and sizes of rooms to accommodate virtually any living pattern for almost any size family. To stay within the initial design and cost limits of the house, Stern offers two bedrooms upstairs, as well as a hall bath, thus leaving 850 square feet of space to be used later. Or the leftover space could be used to make an office upstairs, a studio, a gym, a shop, a playroom, an au pair suite.