While I was attending school studying interior design, trips to Street of Dreams homes were, to us, what trips to Disneyland are, to little Princess-crazed girls.  My recent trip to the Olympia Street of Dreams had me feeling a bit like an adolescent revisiting Disneyland, disenchanted and disappointed.

My first impression of the event, as seen through the windows of the school bus that shuttled us from the Target Place parking lot to the development, the Reserve at Cooper Point, was that there weren’t a lot of houses.  The houses themselves were impressively massive, styled a sort of Craftsman-lodge-meets-a-bit-of-French-Provincial-with-a-twist-of-Victorian.  Off to the undeveloped side of the road, beauty bark replaced the leveled wild vegetation, which was echoed by the faux-stones on facades of houses and in water features.  My daughter loved the yard with the concrete teddy bear and hollow-log water feature while my own hands twitched for a game of miniature golf.

Inside the houses, which we viewed through the crowds of people, all of us wearing the ubiquitous blue booties over our shoes, I noticed an odd proportion in the living spaces.  Kitchens were dominated by mammoth granite islands (small continents, actually) with the first house we visited, the Deschutes, dominated by not one, but two monolithic continent-events, as well as a wet-bar off the second “continent.”  The huge island in the second house, The Arcadia, only provided seating for three, although the outdoor kitchen provided more opportunities for sitting and lounging.  Bedrooms were on the small size, with master bathrooms almost rivaling the size of the bedrooms they adjoined.

It felt to me like overall the homes were designed with an eye toward what would be “showy” â€" a walkway akin to a catwalk across the living space in the Deschutes crossed the random-ashlar faux-stone chimney, looking down over the twin continents in the kitchen and the big-screen TV of the great room. I noted that the other homes, too, seemed big on style, not so big on function; it seemed that in many cases, “living” was done in front of a large-screen flat-panel television. 

For the rest of the story, jump to our Myspace site. â€" Jessica Corey Butler