| Would the illogic of this bother you, each of you? | | Or if you had a choice of 1) would the other two be acceptable and | just considered decoration?
I'm assuming they're all decoration, but as others have said, it's hard to picture from your description. I'm not clear about whether any or all of the houses you're describing have any component that's actually stone or brick -- or whether all of them are just cheap, commercial projects that were victims of Ace and Acme Do-It-Yourself Stick-On Decorations from the "Royalty and WASP Collection".
I find the whole topic of changing design tastes interesting. How does fashion develop? How do we decide what looks good? Part of it, at least, seems to be "kitsch radar": We don't want to risk being wrong in our tastes, so we tend to gravitate toward cutting edge kitsch, which says, "I'm up to date and in tune with fashion" while actually expressing nothing at all. Just as a NY baseball cap, Budweiser t-shirt and Adidas shorts say nothing at all, albeit with a notable ferocity.
Plastic fences and fake rocks are becoming very popular lately. As are fake bricks. People don't seem to notice how ugly most fake rocks are -- little more than textured concrete bricks. I think most people just don't consciously notice such things.
Down the street from me are a couple of McDuplexes, with each unit priced over $1 million. The properties have been desecrated with cheap stockade fencing and low- maintenance shrubbery. I hate to think what's inside.
A duplex condo surrounded by rhododendron and hemlock lumps plopped into piles of mulch, boxed in by stockade fencing, shouldn't sell for $1 million+. So why does it? I can only guess that the buyers don't notice the tasteless no-design. (That, and the fact that the landscaping means no yard work while the fences mean no tedious relationships with neighbors.)
Low ceilings, small windows and missing trim make ranch houses depressing. There's no magic, no reason to live, in a "logical", cubed space. But I don't think most people living in ranch houses ever notice.
An off-white ceiling makes a room look old, but few people will be aware it's the ceiling color that gave them that impression.
Those are all examples of not noticing design, yet being affected by it.
Also, when people do tune in to aesthetics at all, a lot of it is trained. Modernist design started as stripped- down minimalism based on a socialist ideal. But for Americans, socialism is a collectible, not an applicable concept. I live a few miles from a neighborhood of Bauhaus crap that perfectly fits that socialist ideal. No trim. Metal door frames. Metal railings. Those houses cost a fortune. They're considered to be period art. The whole neighborhood is a museum. Let the hoi polloi find their own crap houses that haven't been signed by famous architects. :)
I find that I, myself, like farmhouse style. (Mid-1800s before the vaguely monarchical style of heavy moldings became fashionable.) But that's probably only because I grew up in such a house. If I'd grown up in a Soviet tenement building, might I find that cozy and think any design reeked of dishonesty and excessive capitalism? Perhaps I'd be drawn to living in a converted boiler room?
During the Reagan era brass was big. I even worked on some jobs where people were getting gold faucets for kitchens and baths. These days everything is some variation of silver -- richness but with a high-tech feel. The thing I find fascinating about fashion is how much it usually feels right. I liked brass in 1985. I like brushed nickel now. Yet I know it's just fashion. If brass makes a comeback I'll probably realize that I actually quite like it. :)
I dislike fakeness and I think stuck-on symbols of richness (which includes PoMo generally and probably includes your arches) communicate a degraded self- loathing, while good design should evoke a feeling of upliftedness. Actually, I think of PoMo as a kind of final achievment of "godlessness": Modernism celebrated rationality as an ideal, a refutation of aesthetic as being unscientific. With PoMo we've finally exorcised all aesthetic out of the cultural lexicon, freeing us to bring back symbols in a whimsical manner. We can stick on arches and columns to our square, tasteless structures, just for the fun of it. Plop. The grandeur of Greek history, in the form of sitck-on plastic columns, can decorate my house. The decorations don't have to serve a purpose or even take part in a design. They're just symbols of good taste, a la Charlie the Tuna.
Yet, where am I standing to say these things? I have to acknowledge that much of my own personal taste comes down to nothing more than arbitrary associations coming from past experience.