Have you noticed how many television commercials try to evoke comfort and nostalgia feature a home with a big front porch – generally furnished with a rocker and a kindly looking grandparent?
Even though many people now live in apartment buildings or in subdivisions where a big garage door, rather than a front porch, is the main exterior feature, the notion of the old-fashioned porch evokes warm, fuzzy feelings even among those who have never lived with one.
Porches can define entire neighborhoods. Steve Turner, president of Historic Denver Inc., calls them “the greatest urban neighborhood builder.”
“They foster a sense of community,” he says. “It is impossible for neighbors not to get to know each other when they have front porches. They also make for the most memorable summer evenings. Nothing is as renewing as sitting on your porch while watching a cooling summer rain shower.”
Many homes in New Urban communities that attempt to recapture that same traditional feeling of neighborliness feature front porches. “Front porches foster pedestrian- friendly neighborhoods,” says Denise Gammon, senior vice president of residential development at Stapleton. “Porch-oriented houses create a place that encourages neighborhood interaction resulting in greater community cohesion.”
Porches project a potent message. There is even a Web-design firm that promises, “Like the front porch of a home, your website needs curb appeal – that extra detail or splash of color that makes people want to step inside.” The company’s name? Front Porch Design, of course.
National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” last summer broadcast a series of programs that explored the history, role in American life and literature of the porch.
People who grew up with porches wax nostalgic about them. In the days before air conditioning, and long before the concept of “green building,” they were energy-efficient, shady and often breezy places to keep cool in the summer.
“When I was a child, I spent many warm nights on a screened-in porch on my grandparents’ farm near Plainview, Texas,” recalls Mary Golden of Boulder. “As the grownups drifted into a moonlit reverie, their voices receded and crickets sang up a cool breeze from the high plains. Soon seven wiggly cousins lay still beneath a blue quilt, dreaming of fireflies and lilacs and fresh milk in the morning.”
Whether appended to a farmhouse in the Texas Panhandle, a Denver Square or a treasured Victorian, a spacious porch can be a home’s best feature. People often buy houses for their porches. “The porch was a major reason that I fell in love with the first house I bought in Potter Highlands,” says Leanne Silverman of Denver, “Red brick and white trim, and eventually I found a nicely broken-in swing for it.”
“We initially put our patio table there because our backyard was a wreck and we didn’t want to look at it,” she says. “We’ve spent plenty of warm summer evenings eating dinner on the front porch, which can be simultaneously entertaining and odd because it’s so public.”
Mia DeLong lives on Mapleton Hill in Boulder. “We adore our front porch,” she says. “It’s our outdoor living room in summer. We see our neighbors. They’ll come up and join us, and pretty soon, we had a bunch of people having an impromptu party.”
People love the social aspect of porches, but James Crisp and Sandra Mahoney, authors of “On the Porch” (Taunton, 2007), also recognize their private, cocooning nature.
“Porches are great gathering places, but they can be very private too,” they write. “Where else can you daydream, read, nap, sit quietly with a baby in your arms or chat in hushed tones with a loved one – all while enjoying a breath of fresh air?”
Porches remind Lys Anzia of Boulder of her grandmother’s house. She “lived in northern Alabama near the Tennessee border in a house that was ‘up on the mountain,’ as everyone called it then,” Anzia says. “It was Appalachia country. In the summer, as approaching night was beginning to cool the air, I would sit on the front porch with my grandmother, watching the fireflies … That front porch seemed then to be a great oasis from the rest of the world.”
Porches continue to enthrall, entertain and comfort.
“I grew up in the South, where porch-sitting was an important part of enjoying each day,” says Linda Cornett, who considered a porch to be a must for her Colorado home.
“When we visited my mother’s mother in Chavies, Ky., every day ended with supper on the screened back porch and then sitting on the house-wide front porch to see who passed by,” she says. “While my grandmother rocked and tapped rhythm with her ugly black shoes, Uncle Hale and Aunt Pauline sat on the porch swing playing guitar and singing lovely ballads that probably came over with the first British settlers to the Kentucky mountains.”
Summer nights on the porches. Fireflies. Friends. Family. Such is the stuff of fond recollections of the past and fodder for recollections in the future.
