By Akiko Busch
My father was a journalist, and much of his work revolved around profiles of the important people of his time, politicians, celebrities, artists. One of the most stringent rules that he established for himself was that he never interview his subject directly. In this talk show era of uninhibited self-confession, such a stricture seems something between quaintly polite and preposterous, yet whenever I reread his pieces it is evident to me how through his conversations with the family and friends, the students, teachers, and colleagues of his subjects, a clear and true portrait invariably emerged. And I believe that while it is not a view that is much in fashion today, news can, and often does, arrive directly from the margins of a life, and that the significant facts can often be compiled from the edge of one’s life rather than from its center.
In my own work writing about design, I rarely write about people. Instead, I write about the places in which they live, attempting in some way to interview their houses and offices, the gardens they cultivate, the rooms they arrange, by gathering news from the edges in such a way that the presence of places and the people who inhabit them tend to emerge. And in these interviews with rooms, my father’s words resonate. I am certain these places reveal something about who we are. I am interested in how places take their shape—why a door has been put just where it has, why a wall is painted a bright canary yellow, why things are the way they are. Eventually, some truth about how we take up space is revealed.
In my own house, that truth—like most other things that are true—is both simple and complicated. My husband and I have an agreement. He was once a contractor, which means he’s built many houses for other people. It also means that the one thing he wants to do now is build a house for us, for his own family. It’s a project I have little interest in. But we have a marriage, and so we have come to an understanding. He wants to build us a house. Fine. We get the divorce first. Then, once the frame is up the windows are in and the floors are down, if we’re still talking to each other, great. If we’re still having dinner once a week, better yet. Maybe, eventually, we’ll move in together and live in this beautiful house he’s built for us.
I don’t think this scenario is farfetched. Building houses is right up there with money, sex and work—all better-documented reasons why partnerships dissolve. And I think that’s because people disagree so profoundly about what gives them comfort. For me, the comforts of the home are inextricably linked with history. The house we live in was built in 1792 and I can’t imagine living in a place where no one had ever lived before. My husband’s way of finding home is more assertive, less preoccupied with a sense of continuum. As a consequence, in our family the dialog about comfort has to do with whether we find it in inventing our own sense of fit or in distilling it from tradition.
Yet, even with my strong preference for history, not a day goes by when I don’t admit that our beautiful 200-year-old house makes little sense for how we live today. The center hall Colonial was not just a building type; it was a pattern for living. Past the front door, there is a living room on the right, a parlor on the left, the kitchen and other service areas in back. The bedrooms are upstairs. There is a clear and logical progression to the way this space—passing as it does from public to private realms—has been arranged.
Most homes today express a different logic, one that is more difficult to map. There is no longer a single pattern or cultural definition for comfort. Like so many other things, it’s a matter of personal choice. Some friends of mine recently built a house. Midway through construction, they realized that they each held a different notion of comfort. For the woman it had to do with light and space; her ideal home would be built of glass on a mountaintop. Her husband wanted a cave, a nest, a place of warmth and seclusion. He associated home with a sense of physical containment and security. So they found a way to compromise, with an airy, light-filled, open kitchen and living area, and a series of more solitary loft spaces to which he could retreat in the peak of the roof.
But in the geography of home, mountains and caves are the least of it. The domestic landscape has shifted in recent years in subtle and significant ways, reflecting the changing structure of the family. In the introduction to his book, Small Houses for the Next Century (McGraw Hill, New York, 1995) architect Duo Dickinson observes that the typical family structure today is “fragmenting into a wide variety of households (that include) single-parent homes, multi-generational homes, homes that contain offices, homes that harbor empty nesters, homes for unrelated individuals living together as a family, and on and on. Levittown does not fit the 1990s. The idea of small, mass-produced identical houses set row upon row cannot accommodate the extraordinary variety of use patterns homes are put to today.” Along with the changing structure of the family, there are growing numbers of people working at home; new attitudes towards privacy, security, and home safety; an aging population; and a nascent respect for the natural environment.
Yet at the same time, nostalgia remains a powerful force in the way we think about home. The Old House Journal, which has over 300,000 readers, sells house plans dating from all periods of American architectural history—Georgian townhouses with elegant brick wall masonry, Carolina folk houses with ample front porches, Italianate cottages with charming arched windows and cornices, 17th century Connecticut salt boxes, and rural Greek revivals with delicate fan windows tucked into the gables. Needless to say, none of these include exercise rooms, home spas, or atriums—just three among the many spaces people seem to yearn for today. The magazine’s advertisers offer everything from reproduction Victorian hardware to Amish cook stoves. Never mind that these archaic floor plans and furnishings don’t acknowledge any of the economic and social issues that are reshaping our ways of living and working; people still want them. So any definition of home today must consider how new attitudes and values come up against the familiar; how our needs are served by what we know, as well as by what we remember.
That nostalgia plays a part in the way we structure our homes and lives is further confirmed by anecdotal evidence of another trend, dubbed “return migration” by social scientists. For those baby boomers who move to large urban areas such as New York, Washington, or Los Angeles after college, there is a new appeal, it seems, in returning to the smaller hometowns where they were raised. The lower cost of living, the presumed safety of small towns, the greater sense of community, and an extended family—or perhaps simply the memory of an extended family—are all cited as the compelling forces behind this current migration.
A 1994 survey conducted by Metropolis magazine reaffirms that many of us do need a little history in our lives. When people were asked what room they would most like to add to their houses, traditional domestic spaces like solariums and music rooms were mentioned as often as spas, lap pools, and home offices. One person wrote evocatively of a mini-pool with a floating office, complete with a sound system, phone, and fax—a kind of combined sanctuary and home office—but a much more significant number said they want a traditional library, a private place to linger over the pages of a book—perhaps a more familiar and reassuring way of getting informed than by surfing the web. Yet the next most popular room on people’s wish lists was the exercise room.
When asked to think of their favorite objects, people cited nostalgic, traditional artifacts —a Shaker table, a wicker rocker, a collection of old tins from France, blue glass bottles, an Arts and Crafts side table, a scale model of the Chrysler Building, an old enamel-top kitchen table. It seems that while the floor plan of today’s home may change to accommodate new functions, and while we may rely on high tech appliances in almost every room of the house, the objects of our greatest affection bring a sense of history with them.
We also, it seems, have an affection for morphing space. As citizens of the Millennium, we have accepted the idea of a fluid identity as the condition of our times and hold a high regard for personal reinvention. The physical self can be reconstructed at the gym or with more radical “aesthetic surgery” or liposuction, and redecorated with tattoos, body piercing, henna, and other assorted graphics of the human body. Just as we accept morphing identities in people, so, too, do we find appeal in rooms that mutate effortlessly from one function to another period. While many of us use our bedrooms as offices or kitchens as living rooms, it seems we are becoming increasingly creative in how we adapt space. The living room is a place to eat, the dining room or kitchen a place to work, and the bedroom is the library. The hallway with the piano can become a music room, the studio a wine cellar, and for one especially progressive apartment dweller, the bathtub a conference center.
To get people to think about what home means to them, the survey also asked what room readers most fondly remembered from childhood, and why. The greatest number said the bedroom. “I could hang out under the bed with my cat,” wrote one person. The intersection of solitude and fantasy suggested in that statement pretty much sums up the appeal of the bedroom. The kitchen came in a close second, with others writing longingly of the nourishment—both physical and psychological—found there while cooking with their mothers or grandmothers, making meals out of such improbable ingredients as noodles and jam. For all the allure of the electronic hearth, the real hearth continues to have a sustaining appeal in our collective memory. And finally, there are the basement and the garage, by most accounts, places that have always been quiet and full of junk—-an infallible combination, it seems, to ignite the creative spark in children and adults as well.
It occurs to me that the bedroom, the kitchen, and the basement reflect the three basic realms of home: the private and necessary sanctuary, the place of nourishment and community, the area where things get made. So long as the places we live can accommodate these three very human activities, it might be called home. When one of my sons first started to color pictures, the house he drew had an imprecise shape, between a circle and a square, with two windows hovering near the top and a door floating somewhere between them. The resemblance of this outline of the simple house to the human face was unmistakable. There is beauty and logic in the way my child confused the contours of the face with the profiles of a house. And it occurs to me that this primitive rendering captures the way we imprint ourselves on the places we live.
Just as my son’s drawing of a house was also the portrait of a child, I am certain that writing about home is a way of writing about people. Words furnish a page, much the way a chair or a table may furnish a room. There are times when I think these are parallel processes of assembly. A friend of mine recently returned from a writers’ colony outside Edinburgh. The colony was housed inside a grand old stone castle, and every afternoon at 4:00 o’clock, the writers would gather in the living room for tea and scones. And they would talk. They would talk not about the essays, plays, poems, and fiction they were writing, not about their work or their manuscripts or deadlines. What they talked about was how the stone castle was decorated. They would discuss the masonry walls and flowery wallpaper, debate the fabric of the drapes and the stuffed armchairs, and regale one another with stories about how they were going to go home and redecorate their own homes.
There is something about this anecdote that rings true about the essential connection between arranging words and designing places. Both of these are about finding the logical order of things, about assembling these aggregates of experience in a way that makes sense. A room, like a page, offers us a space to do this. Sometimes that sense of order comes with the way words are arranged on the page. Other times it may come with the way objects have been assembled in a room. Both are ways of finding those arrangements with which we can live.
I am certain that the process of design, very much like the process of writing, is about finding the sense of order to things. Another word for that is fit. And this is the way I try to define design, as having to do with how things fit—how things fit the hand, how furniture fits the body, how people fit the buildings, and how buildings fit the landscape. What this book sets out to do then is look at some of the different ways we find to make things fit. Design, most of all, may be about finding the sense of fit between people, places, and things. And if we think of design as being about fit, we consider not only the physical dimensions, but the moral and social ones as well.
And I would argue that in our increasingly pluralistic, and often chaotic world, finding this sense of fit is ever more important. It may be as simple as the graceful coexistence of technology and nostalgia. And we may need to recognize that there is no necessary dissonance here. My children watch Terminator movies on a TV set that is housed in a Shaker-style cabinet. There is a certain postmodern charm to that. But such confusions can also be more jarring. We tend to reject the formal ceremony of the dining room and put the computer on the dining room table, or sort the laundry there. Then, missing the sense of ritual in our lives, we turn to the ceremonies of Native Americans or Tibetan monks. Such incongruities can confuse our lives. But I would argue that they are also the very basis for finding comfort at home. If anything, where we live can be a place that celebrates and thrives on these incongruities that have, in one way or another, been gracefully resolved. If anything, we can find a way to make them fit.
And it goes without saying that this fit is almost always unlikely, idiosyncratic, personal. Where we live can never be landscapes of logic, though they may have logic and precision designed into them. An image of perfect fit that lingers especially clearly in my mind is that of my neighbor, a widow in her late 70s. She lives alone, and beyond her television, has never displayed much interest in modern technology. On a stormy day last winter when I went to visit her, I was expecting her to be sipping hot tea by the fireplace. Instead, she was sitting in her living room, listening to a tape of the ocean. I listened with her to the sound of the surf and the gulls. “I find it so peaceful,” she told me.
There is something incredibly modern about this vignette, the way someone who is not of the technological age can use a little technology to find a little comfort. It’s a compelling image of a place you might want to live, a landscape where, though you might be hundreds of miles from the ocean, you can find the peace that comes from listening to the waves. Designers and architects often talk about the beauty of multifunctional space, but I can’t think of anyone who has achieved this more gracefully than my neighbor who managed to fit the seashore into her little inland bungalow.
Akiko Busch writes about home and culture. This article has been adapted from Geography of Home (Princeton Architectural Press), hailed as “an appealing, insightful collection of musings on the architecture, psychology, and history of house and home in America” (Kirkus).
In Everything Else is Bric-a-Brac (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022) Busch continues this conversation about home, showing how places come alive for us, and considering our relation to the such commonplace items as the sofa, the stove and the wallpaper. You can find an excerpt here.
Busch’s writing is provocative and playful, lyrical and personal. Together, these books will leave you with the feeling that your deep relationship with home has, at last, been understood. Learn more about this author’s view of nature, design, and culture here: https://akikobusch.com/
