First Party!

A little Christmas spirit(s)!

A few nights ago we officially christened the house with a dinner party, and put our new kitchen to the test in the process. 

When you design a kitchen, you try to plan for all the activities it will need to accommodate day to day as well as the occasional big event.

Can several cooks work in the kitchen at the same time without tripping over each other? Is the range up to the task of cooking multiple items at once? Is there room enough in the fridge to chill all the beverages and store the prepared items until serving time?

Miss K made the placecards
and did the flower arrangements

And the dining area; is there room to add all the leaves to the table plus a couple of card tables? Can you fit, in this case, 17 chairs around the tables without resorting to climbing over one another to get in and out?

Master Bath: Vision and Reality

Man in search of a towel...

 Besides the kitchen, what other room carries as much weight design-wise as the master bath? In this busy world, it seems we all dream of a luxurious bath as the place to pamper oneself and recover from the stresses of life. It needs to offer privacy, serenity, and beauty. And, in the case of the master bath, it also needs to be practical and spacious enough to accommodate two people at once. There is a lot of pressure in designing a bath to meet all these expectations!

Although I don't have any statistics to back me up, I suspect many a house is sold based on buyers falling in love with either the master bath or the kitchen.

If you like to see the process by which a design becomes reality, I hope you'll enjoy this post where I share how our master bath evolved from just a few vague ideas into the final product. (Well, almost final product--nothing in the house is completely finished yet...)

I Contain Multitudes…of Houses! (Part 1)

With apologies to Walt Whitman and the grammar police, what I really mean to say is that, house design-wise, I feel that I am the sum total of all the experiences I have had in my lifetime with houses, gardens, and architecture in general. But you can see what an awkward title that would be!

I started thinking the other day about influential spaces and moments in my life that have informed my attitudes and values about what makes a house a home. I’m organizing my ideas around a concept borrowed from a favorite book of mine, “At a Journal Workshop” by Ira Progoff.

Six Degrees of Separation: Eastern House to Western House

You know the idea about six degrees of separation? That the world is smaller than we realize and that any two people can be connected through as few as four others? Well, my variation on this is about how the thoughts we have are not necessarily as random as they might at first seem, but are connected one to the other with their own logic. Since I had a stream of mind-wandering this evening that started with the house (in a roundabout way), I thought I would share it with you as my “six degrees” moment…

Spirit and Soul

Have you ever noticed how quickly a house recently emptied loses its “life force?” Each time I have left a home that I loved—an apartment I rented or a house I owned and sold—I’ve noticed that almost immediately after the last box is packed and carted away the place feels like a shell and no longer feels like “home.” This is a good thing since it helps ease the pain of leaving. You can’t mourn what no longer exists.

And I suppose this should also be a lesson in how it is people and experiences and memories that make a home, and not physical space or objects. But—material girl that I am—I don’t think this means the physical space and objects are irrelevant. There are houses that are inhabited fulltime and still never feel like home, and others occupied only infrequently that practically pulse with life. What is it then that gives a house its life force?

An American House

When we started thinking about what physical form and stylistic expression our house would take, we were completely open--the house had only the barest outline in our minds and was virtually a blank canvas. Since we had already designed our Whidbey house in a traditional style with allusions to Danish and Swedish country houses, we were thinking about building something completely different--a contemporary house. Something in wood, but definitely modern in its spaces and circulation.

And yet, the more time we spent on our site, the more we realized that a modern house would not be the best fit--for the site, for the block, or for us.

Back to the Beginning

How do you know where an idea comes from or when it starts? I think it is only in hindsight that it is easier to retrace the steps that built idea upon idea, and then decisions and commitments, until the original thought has been made a reality. Even then, it is hard to say where one idea ends and another begins because they are all so linked together. I have always dreamed of building a house. But when did the idea to build THIS house begin? And why on Sunset Hill?