Berry Road Blunder

Spread the love

Berry Road Park, Glendale MO
The 2-story brick home shown above was built in 1940. You can see that a later addition went horribly, horribly wrong. I hope it was a D.I.Y. job so that no professional remodeling firm is responsible for this.

As it stands alone, this is a headshaker, but total bewilderment comes when seen in context to its neighbor directly in front of it.

A 1935 Harris Armstrong home is the calling card for this residential court. The developers even took their cues from the above when building the entry marker, below. The other homes on this street range in age from 1940 to 1951, and come in a small handful of varying contemporary styles. So, again, there is a stylistic context at play in this development… with one house that doesn’t play well with the others.

4 thoughts on “Berry Road Blunder

  1. LOL, I’ve driven by that a few times.

    They house my step-brother lives in is very much like this one. It was a house from the 30s or 40s that got an expansion sometime later. They built a garage and a room over the garage… The problem his house has is structural as well as plumbing and electricity. Even the best intentions of a well laid out plan can’t help if you don’t do your homework. The house has tons of issues due to poor design, like this house–it probably was a DIY job. If you don’t consult the design experts, the plumbers and electrictians then things can go wrong, terrible wrong.

    Unfortunately people sometimes think designers just “make things look nice” but there’s far more to it. They need to know fire codes, understand how electricity and plumbing is routed and often Ned permits. As the case of my step-brothers house, when he had a flood…all sorts of bad problems were discovered that needed fixing due to bad remodel job. Had they consulted a design team, and of course the plumber and electritian, the repair from the flood would have cost a lot less…

    The shortcuts people make, sometimes, can cost you big. I keep remembering that when I see houses like this one… What hidden dangers are there by non-traditional remodels…

  2. I hadn’t seen that first house before. What a massive contradiction the brick base and the rest above is . . .

    It’s great to see the results of all your investigations. Wonderful.

  3. I grew up around this area. Flower Hill Ct.(just down Berry) then Yosemite, down Kirkham. I have always loved this house on the corner and am overjoyed and amazed every time I see it again and it is unaltered. Naturally, I’m also extraordinarily apprehensive about its condition every time I pass bay, as well. I don’t suppose you saw the biiig white house on BRP just up the street, did you? I recall, from my childhood, someone telling me that that house had once had a third story, before a fire took off the original third.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.