It's just a porch...Isn't it?
There's a man called Michael Dolan who wrote a book called "The American Porch: An informal History of an informal Place." His first experience with porches came after he bought a bungalow in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. After spending $10,000 to renovate his porch and make it "sittable," he began to wonder who first created the porch and why it was so popular and why it fell out of favor in the U.S. somewhere around the 1940s. Backyard barbeques? Air conditioning? TV?
The front porch...If you walk in your house and shut the door behind you and cocoon yourself in your air-conditioned sanctuary, you're missing an opportunity to become an integral part of the neighborhood you chose to live in.