The Utah Valley Parade of Homes is Tragicomic

A guided tour of a sadly amusing and shallowly pretentious thing

The Utah Valley Parade of Homes is something that happens only once a year for a few weeks, though it is an echo of something that happens all the time here. It is something so primal it doesn’t need to be explained—even on its official website. But, for the sake of clarity, I will elaborate. Essentially, certain “upscale” homes are selected, and you get to see how ornately they are decorated, how many windows/bathrooms/decks/pools/courts/rooms/staircases they have, and you get to do it with other people who are enthralled by the very prospect. Except, this year things are different. COVID-19 is upon us, and even the Utah Valley Parade of Homes must adapt. Now there is a virtual tour too; you still need tickets mind you, but you can enjoy an evening of envy and covetousness right from your own bedroom (so, yes, like HGTV, but locally sourced). In lieu of buying a ticket I took my own virtual tour through their website, which is replete with details on all the homes featured. You might as well join in too. 

First, the Lucca Modern in Lehi. The designer and builder, BLJ Construction, claims to “[pioneer] new standards for livable luxury at an affordable cost…[and] innovate through...efficient design” Just to make sure we’re on the same page for “affordable” this home costs $2.5 - $3 million. On the “efficiency” front the house has a pool, basketball court, theater, exercise room, fire pit, and outdoor kitchen. It’s also intriguing that all the houses are shown in these strange computer modeled pictures even though they are all, ostensibly, completed and ready for guests. Perhaps natural light is too harsh to showcase the luxurious materials (nearly all locally sourced if you’re curious) used in constructing these “masterpieces.” But, for all the money poured into this “beauty” it appears a little more than a bunch (I mean, really a lot) of rooms jutting out in boxy outgrowths. As if one makes ‘Lucca Moderns’ by means of simple inflation. You can almost imagine each room popping off and out like a bouncy house going up. The facade highlighted in the introductory photo shows five repetitions of a boring and tired design, a facade with a window placed smack dab in the center of an arrow-like shape (the pointed end shaped by the arch of the roofing) the non-window area smothered in slate gray siding. For all this money it appears you only get the McMansion equivalent of a double-wide. The same features, just more of them. It is nice, though, that BLJ Construction offers to build dreams, not just homes. Though that also makes the implications of this soul-less structure rather frightening.

Next, welcome to the Big Cottonwood in Lindon. This home is much easier-on-the-eyes (and budget). But, as it is a ‘‘smaller’’ home (only 3680 sq ft!), it must be subtly marketed for seniors. The description is quite cozy and cute (too much of either for a ‘‘normal’’ home). It is “perfect for main floor living, while the roomy loft upstairs is perfect with sleepovers with the grandchildren, a craft room that will be the envy of all who visit…” Okay, not really very subtly marketed after all.

Life-stages are now marked by the size of the house we buy—the starter home for when you are trying to “make partner,” the dream home for when you “make partner,” now the [insert appropriate term here] when you’re unable or unwilling to work 60-70 hours every week. This is intriguing, we don’t yet have proper terminology for a modest house that is marketed to seniors. Calling it something like a “terminal house,” or “finishing home,” is too morbid, and besides, an existence of material consumption serves to mainly prime us for the next purchase. When there isn’t another one in sight perhaps the marketing ideas run dry. 

Come on in to The Maison de Reve in Woodland Hills. Now this one has to be one of my favorites. And by that I mean one of the most ridiculously and fantastically overwrought. An integral part of this house is its name, it means dream house in French. It’s amazing when they just spoon-feed us these things. I’m not-so-secretly hoping for a Pavlovian response when the prospective home-buyers Google the significance of the exotic name. But, who knows, the name could be a turn-off to the more nationalistic among us.

As an aside, perhaps for further thought later, this idea of “dream house” appears as a trope, or, more compassionately, a refined pattern or dramatic theme for these homes.

This home has the faux-refined look of a faux-French chateau. For all the pretentiousness of the French vieux-riche (I think this covers Louis XIV and his friends) at least they built original structures. The price listed is over $5 million and features a man cave with a theater and golf simulator, a babe cave with workspace and private study (also for later stewing: think about why the man cave’s features indicate a focus on entertainment while the babe cave’s features indicate a focus on reflection and work), a basketball court, and another theatre—it’s truly spelled in the British style, which is likely a reflection of the more refined nature of the setting—meaning this isn’t the theater where dad’s going to watch Fast Five while finishing off a bag of pork rinds. The house’s designers also state that they want all their “projects to reflect the unique personalities of each and every one of [their] clients.” I’m interested to meet the couple whose personality is reflected in the house, aren’t you?

This house also has something I had never heard of before—a show garage. The Wall Street Journal helped fill me in and describes them as “elaborate garage spaces that...display...vehicles as works of art.” So, essentially, we now have neat little places inside temples of materialism to fawn at the altar of even more perfect and lustrous material. It has six bedrooms and 13 bathrooms. It would seem incomprehensible that there are more than double the bathrooms than rooms, unless this house was built specifically with the Utah Valley Parade of Homes in mind. Which, if it was, is then a noble undertaking and renders moot all my previous judgments. Everything makes far more sense now, and reflects the fact that the house was built with it’s not-too-far distant dismantling in mind as to not permanently mar the views around the property or over-sprawl Woodland Hills. 

Lastly, turn your gaze toward The Baccarat in Alpine. Even though Baccarat is a French card game the look is more evocative of a Ziggurat. Let me explain, for a close resemblance of a Ziggurat this home is not (though the names could flow together in a song). But the imposition of a monolithic structure over an area, to create a looming, even foreboding, presence, is something both our modern “Baccarat” and the ancient Ziggurat (see, “the Great” and “of Ur”) do well. Whether that is a good attribute or not, I am ironically undecided. The liberal use of ascending entrance steps is also another thing both types of structures share (if Baccarat eventually becomes a structural genre, heaven forbid).

The house is very “contemporary” meaning that it is full of geometric shapes all framed at right angles and likely looks far better in CAD than it does when framed by the natural landscape and direct sunlight. The beautiful mountains set behind the house paradoxically detract from the home as the direct contrast between genuine beauty and artificial opulence seem an implicit condemnation of the latter.

I know that we shouldn’t expect the builder’s and designer’s descriptions of vacuity to be full of cutting wit and breath-taking imagery, but this may be the least vivid and shallow of all, “Custom Pool with a raised Sun Deck Impressive 3 story floating staircase Unique custom chandeliers and lighting package Indoor High-Performance 10x17 trampoline included in gymnastic room Oversized glass curtain walls, windows, and sliding walls to open outdoor living to the indoor 2.5 acres of land tiered with purposeful landscaping and home 8 car/boat garage including 2000 sq ft detached garage/pool bath Outdoor sport court with basketball and pickle ball designed.” I believe the only way this is to be read is without taking a breath (as indicated by the absence of nearly all sentence structure) while you maintain a look of dreamy wonder. 

At the conclusion of this virtual tour, many likely green with envy, I must ask, what does the Utah Valley Parade of Homes say about us?

Perhaps it indicates that we want the appearance of beauty, respectability, and wealth more than we want anything genuine? Most of the homes’ descriptions go out of their way to describe how well the space functions for parties and for guests. It’s as if the house is mostly for our friends and neighbors to visit and admire—not to spend too much time in though—so they will know that we are persons of great wealth and resources. So we can sheepishly answer (in a way that must end with a self-effacing laugh) “Yes, we have an indoor basketball court, the boys absolutely love it!” So we can take entire church congregations to our premises. So we can host parties for hundreds of our closest friends. So that even if we can’t truly feel successful, someone will see us that way. 

But these houses are likely more than just facades with which to project success—face-lifts without the social stigma. These houses are shrines to ourselves and our comfortable paradigms. We live in an age heavy on assuaging oneself but light on critically evaluating oneself. Fittingly, these are places of refuge where we can live in a happy denial. An alternate reality where over-sprawl isn’t destroying the natural world, where we deserve our gross excesses, where inequality is just an excuse for not trying, where convenience is king and disposability is unquestioned. It may be the 21st century’s distorted reflection of ancient asceticism. We withdraw to faux luxury and wide-screen TV’s so we can be coddled with an untroubled and sleepy existence, instead of leaving it all behind for the wilderness, to there be confronted with a revelatory reality.

Because of our collective focus on appearance—which gradually inures us to superficiality and artificiality—, comfort, and shallow entertainment (see “man cave” and “golf simulator” above) we generally don’t pursue genuine aesthetic beauty in our homes (or business parks, gas stations, strip malls, etc.)  

Observing this state of affairs, Wendell Berry, the noted writer and farmer, speaking of another’s explorations of Shaker artistry (the polar opposite to our modern ethos), says: “And searching out the lesson, for us, of the Shakers' humble, impersonal, perfect artistry, that refused the modern divorce of utility and beauty, [he] wrote: "Unfortunately, we do not desire to be such as the Shaker was; we do not propose to 'work as though we had a thousand years to live, and as though we were to die tomorrow.' Just as we desire peace but not the things that make for peace, so we desire art but not the things that make for art. . . we have the art that we deserve. If the sight of it puts us to shame, it is with ourselves that the re-formation must begin."

We live in an age of superficial appearances, and good architecture and design—focused on craftsmanship and artistry—fight against a powerful current. Perhaps then, the deepest tragedy of the Parade of Homes isn’t that it happens at all, though that is surely part of it, but that most of what it celebrates is so vacuously and objectively terrible.