Word: americanization
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What does the new American home look like? The shift is obvious as soon as you step through the front door. The grand entryway - the two-story foyer with a sweeping, often multipronged staircase - is quickly giving way to a more modest entrance. Stairs are less about architectural flourish and more about getting upstairs (if you can imagine). That means they're either moving back up against the wall or turning into more-compact switchbacks. The two-story foyer is becoming less and less popular too - in an era of tighter purse strings, who wants to heat and cool...
Meanwhile, outdoor living space is growing. Nearly two-thirds of architects are seeing increased demand for things like outdoor kitchens and fireplaces, according to a survey by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). "There are no longer these hard divides between how folks are living inside and outside," says Kermit Baker, AIA's chief economist and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies...
...home-buying. Rather, the deduction is an artifact of the 1894 federal income-tax code, under which all interest was deductible, since pretty much all interest was a business expense. There weren't really loans to buy houses back then. In other words, a massive and costly cornerstone of American housing policy isn't even something we chose...
...Hummer division has commanded attention ever since the vehicles first appeared on American highways at the height of the sport-utility boom...
...according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research by Marius K. Luedicke from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Craig J. Thompson of the University of Wisconsin and Markus Giesler of York University in Toronto. "Hummer drivers believe they are defending America's frontier lifestyle against anti-American critics," the study notes, adding that Hummer owners employ the ideology of American foundational myths, such as the "rugged individual," and the "boundless frontier...