For many in the design world, the chickens have come home to roost for the typical modern farmhouse. Shiplap walls, black windows…. It’s all about as expected as clerestory windows on a stuck-in-time 1960s ranch. And it’s very much “of an era”—even if that era was less than five years ago. Call it the vernacular of 2020.
The ubiquitousness of the modern farmhouse is in part due to trend-hungry builders, says architect Jim Rill of his namesake Bethesda, Maryland, firm. “There are some very, very nice modern farmhouses out there that are sometimes done by really good architects—and they even are good today if they get them right, [because] they’re more proportioned,” Rill says. “What happens is the builder gets wind of it and they say, ‘Hey, look, we’ve got a new trend,’” and soon enough, it feels like they’re everywhere.
In Denver, where I live, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a modern farmhouse—often sandwiched between two century-old brick foursquares, and standing out like a black sheep in the flock. “Even today, [modern farmhouses] pop up in all these neighborhoods where you have tear-downs,” he notes. You know the look: the white house with the board and batten siding, metal roofs, and black windows. To put it bluntly, “They’re not done particularly well,” says Rill, “and then they get saturated.” The issue, he notes, is a failure to take it past cookie-cutter cliché. “I don’t have a problem with a modern farmhouse, but you have to push it to the next level. And a lot of these infill lots and things like that, they’re all trying to be modern farmhouses, and that’s where it gets its bad name.”
Blessedly, that’s all starting to change as designers and architects work to whip up more artisanal, authentic versions of the style—planting a seed for a less-homogenous future. Jennifer Garner’s LA home, which held the cover of AD’s September 2024 issue, is one such example. Designed by Steve and Brooke Giannetti with Laura Putnam, it looks Old World, with its stone detailing and more saturated color palette.
