The male condition tolerates granite kitchen countertops, linen drapes and bathtubs fit for a Turkish palace.
These things flutter in the periphery, however. Much of what seizes the domestic realm of a man’s imagination dwells downstairs, where he keeps his shrines.
To booze.
To games.
To television.
This year’s metro Denver Parade of Homes, east of Castle Rock, runs July 30 through Sept. 5 and exploits man’s weaknesses for leisure and license.
“We have the virtual-golf room, putting greens in backyards, pool tables, game rooms,” says Vicki Pelletier, an executive with the event’s sponsor, the Homebuilders Association of Metropolitan Denver. “I think it does appeal more to the manly side this year.”
For some of us, Dad’s special place in the home was in a basement, behind a Formica-topped bar lit with Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon signs. There was a dart board, a pool table, a stereo. Men smoked and listened to sports on the radio and drank beer and Manhattans.
The mansions on parade in
Douglas County respect that tradition, but amplify it with such gusto it’s like transforming a fondness for backyard swingsets into Disney World.
Television comes via projectors, on 120-inch screens. Bars have polished sandstone tops and stainless steel refrigerators. Seating around one pool table is made from exotic zebra wood.
Whether Schlitz sign or zebra wood, the idea is the same: a room as retreat.
Back in the day, Dad worked somewhere else, Mom usually stayed at home, and when Dad alighted within his castle, he desired loafing, not more labor.
Mom, too, wanted an escape from the kitchen and the laundry room. She retired to the bathtub.
The age of the iPod has sprinted past that of the phonograph, but the domestic divide remains.
The male side of the house, including an obsession with fire in the form of outdoor grills and fireplaces, takes center stage at this year’s event. Hordes of people will troop through the seven citadels on display and imagine life inside.
Fellas, time to smoke, drink and play with your money – on the sly!
If you drop $1.6 million for Russell Homes’ 6,200-square-
foot, English country manor, you’ll get a poker room paneled with African mahogany, floored with leather and holding its own humidor, all of it hidden behind a faux bookshelf-wall.
Golf? But of course. Pinnacle Peak’s 9,900-square-foot, $2.4 million “house” – really, it’s more like an empire – enjoys its own virtual-reality golf room.
A grilling man, are you? Then you’d fall for Renaissance Homes’ 6,226-square-foot, $1.8 million Teutonic dream, with its “cordial room” for after-dinner cigars and drinks and its big statue of a buck deer on a patio just off the downstairs “den” acreage. In addition to several outdoor fire pits, the house has two outdoor kitchens.
These estates are part of Pradera, a new 1,500-acre community carved out of rugged hills and clustered around a private country club.
The builders say they’re targeting entire families, not just men or women. The kitchens, for example, will inspire any Jack or Jacqueline with their size and appointments.
But consider the secret humidor-happy poker room.
When a builder hides a poker room in a house, the builder is thinking: guy.
“We’ve got flat screens everywhere, TVs that pull out from the walls on articulating arms,” says Cliff Jones with Jewell Custom Homes, which is building a 7,747-square-foot, $2.2 million contemporary house on the 10th green of the golf course.
There’s also a urinal in the master bath.
“That way,” Jones says, “the lady doesn’t have to worry” about a toilet seat left in the up position, and the gentleman doesn’t have to remember to return the seat to the down position when he’s finished.
The 7,116-square-foot, $2.6 million Italian villa built by Sonoran Custom Homes features his-and-hers toilets – another solution to the problem – and the kind of garage that would make some men weep.
A driver can pull in and park the car atop a rotating slab of concrete. This solves the pesky backing-out issue – by revolving the car in the garage, the driver exits the bay nose first – but it also helps a guy celebrate his beloved Lamborghini or Rolls-Royce.
Builders gun for the hearts of guys with more vigor than in the past, says Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C.
“They don’t need seven bedrooms, so they have space for these rooms,” he says.
The Parade of Homes’ bounty of guy-friendly rooms “speaks volumes to what these builders have in the back of their minds,” says Pelletier.
The people buying these houses, she says, are “more family oriented.” And the men, she says, increasingly ask themselves: “Can I work at home and be a part of my family’s life and yet still maintain the manly side of me, with a pool table and a bar and three flat-screen TV’s behind my bar?”
For the men of Pradera, the question is answered.
For the man of “The Retreat,” a 5,700-square-foot, $1.6 million contemporary house by Burton Customs, thoughts of leaving the home for a pint and a game at the local pub will compete with dreams of heading downstairs.
“We’ve got three TVs stacked above our bar to give it a sports bar look,” says builder Russell Burton. “We were shooting for that.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
PARADE OF HOMES
Dates: July 30-Sept. 5
Hours: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Cost: $10 weekdays, $12 weekends, cheaper for kids and seniors
More information: 303-778-1400, or paradeofhomesdenver.com
