When it comes to building a house, architect Mark L. Giarraputo knows his stuff. Homes his firm has built in Maryland, Washington and Virginia have won many recent awards, including seven this year for custom homes from the Maryland National Capital Building Industry Association.

The interesting issue for Giarraputo and others in his business is the constant ebb and flow of American attitudes toward the places where we live -- our ultimate lifestyle statement and refuge. For more than 200 years we have been redefining our homes as we work to impress our neighbors, live better lives and take advantage of technological innovations to make life easier.

The fun thing -- for the people who buy homes and the architects who design them -- is that there are so many different kinds of right architectural answers to meet the widely varied needs and desires of people with large families or small, urban settings or rural, big budgets or small.

So, where is housing going now? We spoke with Giarraputo recently in the Bethesda offices of Studio Z Design Concepts LLC, a firm he and another 1988 architecture graduate of The Catholic University of America founded in 1999. What are the biggest challenges that you face in designing a home ?

First and foremost, always budget. No. 2, you hear a lot of negativity toward development within close-in metropolitan areas of D.C. or Baltimore. People are getting concerned at the size of some of these infill designs. Our goal and challenge is make them more compatible, bringing the scale and proportion of these new homes down so that the neighbors feel good about it and their life and their openness is being respected so that they don't feel they are being built on top of. And there are new amenities that people are looking for in these new homes and they don't want to give them up. It's up to us to make them fit properly. What do people want in a home today, and how do you achieve that with your work?

They want it to function for them, as a family, as an individual. For example, upstairs family rooms are becoming popular, as a place where children or young adults can hang out and watch TV with some of their friends. Kids will have a couple of friends over; they are playing games on their computer. But over time that space can then become a swing space, it can become a homework area, it can become Dad's office or it can become a small sitting room. They are looking for command center areas on the first floor, often for Mom. It's a multipurpose area that can have mudroom capabilities; there might be a big Price Club-type pantry space where you can put all of your big packages. And then there's also a big desk area, where all of the mail gets put. It might be Mom's office area; she can have a bulletin board for the kids' assignments for homework. There might be a nice big bench, lockers. There might be an additional sink in there or an informal powder room there, so that when the kids come in from play, that's where they've got to drop their stuff.

Dressing areas in master bedroom suites. In the '80s and '90s there was a trend toward very large master bedroom areas. What we are trying to do now is make them more intimate, save some square footage, get the furniture out of that bedroom space. The big pieces of furniture are going into closets or more toward the bathroom. People love built-ins. Media rooms and exercise rooms are very popular. You can spend $5,000, you can spend half a million dollars on a media room. In what direction is architectural design of homes headed?

I think things are trending more toward smaller homes. They're not making any more land out there. You make things as compact as possible, with as little wasted space as possible. You keep smaller spaces open from, say, a hallway into a room, so that it can be flexible -- if you are entertaining and if you want to extend the dining room table into the hallway a little bit, you can do that. That great room with the kitchen and breakfast area being so open makes it feel bigger. We have more custom details, and that is making those rooms a little more special: crown moldings, beams, columns. They are taking the formal spaces away and putting more space toward the informal. What rooms or spaces do you believe will fall by the wayside?

Living rooms, I think, are really going by the wayside. I think you are going to see more houses with one-car garages as opposed to two-car garages. We are seeing a trend toward that in close-in areas. Big, graceful foyers that were pretty predominant in the '80s and '90s -- that big statement where you come in the front door -- those two-story spaces are really passe. But you are doing wonderful ceiling detail. Most of the homes are being built with 9- or 10-foot ceilings, and 8-foot was the standard for years. If you are doing [details], let's make it more efficient and more intimate. ... We're doing a house now that actually has a motor on the chandelier: It goes up and down so you can clean it. We are fixing the house; it was designed by someone else. [The chandelier] was about 19 feet [up]. And laundry rooms are upstairs. They're not in the basement anymore. What are some of the key elements undergoing rapid change these days?

"Green" building is huge right now -- building houses that have renewable resources behind them. We are seeing insulation trends where people are looking not at the R30, R38 insulation they are used to in their attics; they are now looking at twice that. You can use spray-in cellulose or foam that is very compact and gives you a very high R-value. And you can combine that with the traditional insulation. A big trend is toward high thermal value of windows, sealing a house in so that the outside climate is not getting in. Geothermal is huge. Prices have come down so that people are really seeing the advantage, that if they are doing this custom home and will be living there 20 or 30 years, what's the upside on this? If it costs us $40,000 or $50,000 to put this very efficient system in and then in 15 years we can recoup our costs, and then we are not paying for energy or very little of it. That's fantastic. Passive solar. Creating less impervious surface, so that there is less runoff to tributaries and the bay. We have not talked about the exterior. What do people want on the outside?

At least in our office, very, very traditional homes. Natural materials are very popular -- stone, brick, cedar siding, clapboard, Hardiplank -- people feel like they are getting a lot of low maintenance out of that type of product. Porch roofs and screened porches are popular, where people can get three seasons out of these rooms, and sometimes they are putting little heating systems out in these rooms. Outdoor living is huge. People are putting TVs outside on their screened porches -- big plasma screens. Amazing. Let's talk about some design elements that have changed. I see that you have recessed lighting throughout your homes. Have the chandeliers and the ceiling fixtures we hate to dust gone out of vogue?

No. What is very typical in some of the homes these days is this: a chandelier in combination with recessed within a room. You'll get low-voltage lighting around the perimeter of a room to highlight a piece of art or create a different kind of ambience. Track lighting is becoming a little bit popular. People like the cleanliness of [recessed lighting]. I think people don't understand what a house feels like with a lot of recessed lights in it because when they get into it, they add lamps. And the quality of that light is a whole lot better than the quality of the light that is coming down from 10 feet above you. It's hard to read with a light that's way up as opposed to a reading lamp that's here. But people have a tendency to say, what's the easiest thing to do. You flip a switch and six recessed lights go on. I also see space that is versatile for the interior design of a room. There's more than one place to put the sofa, so to speak. Is that intentional?

Within bedrooms, within great rooms, within breakfast areas, breakfast table space, all of those should have options for furniture placement. Within secondary bedrooms, we try to give two bed walls. Builders are even going so far as in family rooms or great rooms to wire for TV and media to two different locations so that people have a flexibility when they move in to put an armoire on one wall or a credenza wih a TV above, or you can take the TV and put it above a fireplace. In breakfast areas, people do banquettes where a table can fit into a nook. It saves space.

andrea.siegel@baltsun.com