Dream Homes

DREAM HOME details planned with builder Pam Sites can include stained-glass windows, skylights, greenhouses, curved staircases and a kitchen island with shelves for cookbooks. Whatever you desire, Sites will build. There's one hitch. Sites designs for a world where people would be 5 or 6 inches tall. She creates dollhouses as if they were real homes, but scaled so each inch represents a foot. She makes tiny two-by-fours and roof trusses, wires 12-volt electrical outlets behind wallboards of acid-free mat board, installs stone fireplaces and ceiling fans.

When hearth and home - together with a growing family and an onsite family business - are at the center of day-to-day living, a small and dated one-story farmhouse in Ellicott City begins to burst at the seams. To keep their extended family under one roof while preserving the one-bathroom house built in 1954, the Harbin and Taylor families found the only solution was to build additions. "My mom and uncle were raised on the original farm down the road," Kim Harbin Taylor said. "That house was on 18 acres, and they farmed an additional 44, raising sweet corn and tomatoes.

Carroll could be in line for its first upscale "Dream Homes" project.The Home Builders Association of Maryland, which wants to build its showcase 1997 development in a golf course subdivision near Finksburg, is recruiting builders and checking the procedure for getting the county planning commission to clear the proposal.The 50 houses planned in the final two sections of the River Downs subdivision will add students at West Middle School in Westminster, projected to be at 105 percent of capacity in September.

Robert and Miriam Stern's condominium in the Annen Woods community in Pikesville is emblematic of their many years together — interesting, colorful, tastefully artistic and comfortably eclectic in style. This latest chapter in their story finds the retirees and longtime empty-nesters choosing to downsize and simplify their lives while keeping close the treasures they have collected and the memories attached to them. "We bought this end unit in the front of the building in June 2012," said Miriam Stern, a 71-year-old former medical secretary.

For those of us who don't have his-and-her walk-in closets; octagonal bathrooms with whirlpools to soak in; wet bars in our sprawling master suites; state-of-the-art sound systems hidden behind our walls; high-ceilinged, ceramic-tiled foyers or mega-TV media centers . . .For those of us whose ceilings run more to flat vanilla Sheetrock than ornate coffered or vaulted; whose cellars are junked with the accumulated stuff of our lives, not good wines in...

Despite a disappointing turnout for the annual Dream Homes event last month, builders say the show will go on next year.The Home Builders Association of Maryland, co-sponsor of the new-homes extravaganza that debuted in 1994, has found a site in Howard County where up to 10 builders could construct showcase homes displaying innovative designs and products, as well as cutting-edge technology."

Housing, planning officials to speak at symposiumState housing and planning officials are scheduled to be some of the speakers at a symposium Feb. 14 on planning and growth management in Maryland.The 9 a.m.-to-noon event is sponsored by the Home Builders Association of Maryland, and meets the new Maryland Real Estate Commission continuing education requirement for a three-hour course on legislative issues. The fee is $40 per person, which includes parking at the Biddle Street garage. The registration deadline is Friday.

The Dream Homes have come to Odenton, which says something about what's happening to this western Anne Arundel County town.Odenton has always been a community of tangibles and unretouched reality, not the stuff of dreams.Army tanks, camouflage, railroads -- that's the Odenton we've known. Modest homes. A gritty commercial strip. A place where middle-class people work and raise families and take baths in ordinary tubs.Ordinary tubs don't exist in the Dream Homes.The Dream Homes are part of Piney Orchard, the huge planned && unit development which is part of the new Odenton, which is supposed to connect with the old Odenton one of these days.

WHEN THE Homebuilders Association of Maryland showcased six expensive residences in its six-week-long Dream Homes show last fall, an estimated 30,000 curious folks ventured out to see them in the Piney Orchard development of Odenton. The dream apparently caught on: The county has issued permits for 264 new condominiums and townhouses, with price tags around $115,000.Add to these the additional sections of townhouses to be constructed by the Dream Homes' builders and the conclusion is inescapable that Piney Orchard sales are strong.

In 14 years, Bruce Scherr had just about built it all, from sprawling homes in the suburbs to affordable, $72,000 townhouses in the city. Then he met the ultimate challenge.As an officer in the Home Builders Association of Maryland, the president of Scherr Homes had worked on planning a "Dream Homes" exposition three years ago. As the economy began improving, the group finally found a central site that could support $500,000-plus homes and a developer -- Greenebaum & Rose Associates -- who could work with multiple builders.

For artist Susan Yonkers, a Maryland Institute College of Art graduate and gardening enthusiast, and her craftsman husband, Bill, a large outdoor canvas was a prerequisite. So the couple found a single-family, ranch-style home on 2 acres in a relatively secluded spot off Mays Chapel Road in Baltimore County. "It's an oasis; a home for all seasons," said Susan Yonkers, 64, seated at her sunroom table and gazing out through wide windows into her backyard as birds gathered at one of her feeders and hopped on the granite stones of the landscaping.

Brandon Hamschin grew up next door to a dairy farm in rural western Pennsylvania. So when this 31-year old engineer headed south to work in an applied physics lab in Laurel, Md., he knew a complete change was due and willingly opted for city-life. "I was fairly homeless before I moved here," he recalled. The applied physics lab put me up. " His search for houses online paid off when he found a small, two-story row house with basement and rooftop deck on a quiet street in the east Baltimore neighborhood of Canton.

Most people will say that no matter how big the home, or how many levels and rooms inside, family and guests always seem to gather in the kitchen. Amy Askew, who has lived with her husband and children in their very large, Craftsman-style version of a Dutch Colonial in Roland Park, certainly agrees. "This is where everything happens - where we prepare the food, where we eat almost all of our meals and where we have the really important conversations," she said, sitting at the 8-foot-long by 3-foot-deep kitchen table with an old barn door for a top. "I can see out the back deck and see the tree line, and the dogs are always at our feet.

GrandView, a condominium highrise in the heart of Annapolis Towne Centre, certainly lives up to its name, especially in the 12th-floor penthouse of Barry and Olga Scher. In this three-bedroom, 3½-bath unit with a den, living room, dining room, open kitchen and two balconies, the couple marvels at the views of the Bay Bridge and the sailboats, cruise and cargo ships that pass beneath it daily. Former residents of Washington's Georgetown/Palisades neighborhood, the Schers, tired of climbing the stairs in their four-story home, set about searching the area for the perfect condo, even checking out the Capital's infamous Watergate complex.

Many buyers looking for a lovely and quaint place to live in Baltimore City would probably have torn down the crumbling wreck of a house (in a perfect downtown location, however) in favor of rebuilding from the ground up. Not so with Kevin and Shelley Horten, who greet their guests at the side entrance of a completely rehabilitated, end-of-group rowhouse in Federal Hill. "When I first moved to Baltimore, I had never lived in a city," noted Kevin Horten, a 45-year-old vice president of Supplies Unlimited, a building supplier in Southwest Baltimore and an Ohio native.

Jay Dackman's Canton home is bright, open, contemporary and directly on the waterfront at the Anchorage Marina. The three-story, six-level brick townhouse is filled with framed puzzles of Impressionist masterpieces, hung as they are completed by the 54-year-old attorney and real estate investor. In addition to the puzzles, a hobby which Dackman says relaxes him after a busy day, he revels in the whimsical collectibles placed on every wall and in most corners of his 2,000-square-foot interior.

When Baltimore builders launched their first Dream Homes exposition last year, they spared no expense on nine showcase mansions.Priced up to a half-million dollars, as large as 7,000 square feet, the homes in a new subdivision in Baltimore County had every imaginable luxury: skylight cupolas and hand-painted solaria, third-floor balconies and marble foyers, billiard rooms, wraparound porches, even fireplaces in every room.Most of the 55,000 visitors to the Home Builders Association of Maryland event last summer could merely gawk -- and dream.

Korey Homes, of Forest Hill, is celebrating 10 years in business this year. The business was founded in 2001 by father and son, Ken and Korey Smith. "We are humbled to be able to provide so many families with their dream homes and we look forward to many more years of building communities," Korey Smith, president of Korey Homes, said in a news release. Korey Homes is a Maryland-based company whose staff has decades of experience providing custom home building, home additions, outdoor patios, outdoor decks, sun rooms, garage building, home renovations, and home remodeling services to people in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Cecil County, and Harford County, as well as York County and Southern Pennsylvania.

Most visitors walking along the streets in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood cannot resist peeping into the windows of its restored homes and marveling at the variety of interiors lying behind the rows and rows of brick facades. "All of these houses are so different, really," said Pauline Hildebrandt, a 60-year-old retired real estate agent who has lived with her husband in their three-story Charles Street home since moving from Fairfax County, Va., in 2010. "We didn't have to renovate; everything was here.