House and Home

A couple things lately have made me mindful of the huge difference between a house and “home”.  Design is exceptionally important when it comes to living in a house – the most well designed houses are those that “work”, meaning efficient spaces, excellent traffic patterns, abundant natural light and ventilation, and no over-arching maintenance concerns.

But home?  Well, it’s ohsomuchmore than design.   

My architect husband, Chris, and I spent the lion’s share of last Sunday tearing out the circa 1949ish  “picture window” (7’ long by 4’ tall – what a view from the sink to the back yard!) from our kitchen wall and replacing it with an energy-efficient, beautiful wood-framed triple double-hung unit.  As I sat on the deck, gazing through the gaping hole in the wall and awaiting instruction for my next task, I got to thinking about the many, many memories we’ve made in that kitchen, in that house.  I spent countless hours fixing birthday dinners and baking birthday cakes, preparing gourmet meals for family and friends and the occasional “popcorn and milkshake” Sunday dinners.  

For twenty-one years running, that kitchen overflowed with people full of Christmas joy at our annual holiday gatherings.   I’ve nursed three children through sickness and stitches, broken hearts and broken promises, joyously witnessed their triumphs and cried with them over their failures, in that house.

We have twice re-floored the kitchen, thrice re-painted the old, old pine cupboards.  I bathed tiny baby #3 and canned tomatoes in that kitchen sink, peeled, cored and prepped probably tons of veggies over time.   

The newest task for the sixty-plus year old heavy-duty stainless steel sink and counters is as the worksite for some of the best home-brewed beer made anywhere – a task for which the entire family has, for one batch or another, gladly offered their assistance.

I left my deck chair and headed into the kitchen to look through the wall to the outside and stood, transfixed, memories flooding back of more than 20 years of play in that back yard.  It’s been only in the last few years that grass has truly taken root, grown green and, well, almost lush.   Years of childhood play – kicked soccer balls, tossed Frisbees, backyard swimming pools, snow forts, races, summernighttime tag and firefly catching – all took a huge toll on the lawn.  I could  hear their voices – my kids and all the neighborhood kids – laughter, shrieks, sometimes tears – echoing through my mind.   


This is what home is.  

There’s a Dallas TX Architect whose blog I follow.  His post from last Monday entitled "Someone Wants to Buy My House" drew me back into my Sunday afternoon reverie.   We often think about selling our old house.  I mean, do we really need a big old 4-bedroom house with its demanding attitude for maintenance?  Two of the three kids have moved on, #3 will shortly do the same.  We long for a sleek, modern, smaller home that we’ve designed.  And yet, moving out of this love-and-laughter-filled house will be tough.   

That’s what home is – memory making, loving, caring, grieving, celebrating - living life.   Does design matter when it comes to making a home?  Maybe not so much.  Design matters, though, when it comes to making a life.

Design yours well. 

Even Mum and the Cat get to rest sometimes

House for the 80's Ages Up

"I’m excited!  I just ran across this article today as I was looking to see if I could find the original article from Woman’s Day magazine.  We built this house thirty years ago in 1983.   Although I could not find my copy of Woman’s Day that my husband had stolen from the lobby in the hospital, I still have my copy of Mechanix Illustrated:  Home Improvements Number 11 with the same article."

Saskatchewan Home Owner

Those of you who have followed Architect Chris Fye's design path these many years will, I am sure, take almost as much delight in this story as we did.  The quote above is the opening statement of a letter emailed to us at our designmatters.cfa@gmail.com address.  It references an issue of "Design Matters" she'd found when she googled "House for the 80's".  Design Matters is also the title of the electronic newsletter we send out every month that talked about this house and our desires to re-design it for the 21st Century. (the newsletter can land in your inbox too - email me at designmatters.cfa@gmail.com!)

 

Thirty years ago, Chris’s award-winning “House for the 80’s” was built in Columbus, Indiana and published in, the March 1982 edition of Woman’s Day magazine (a competition for University of Illinois architecture students sponsored by the magazine).  

A few posts back (yep, just scroll through previous posts and you’ll find the post entitled "You Say You Want An Evolution?), I wrote about our strong desire to capture and record all of the many houses built from this simple, yet endearing, house plan.  It continues to amaze us how often we hear from those who were smitten by that house when it starred as the cover photo of the magazine.

Just a couple weeks ago, we received the lovely email from a couple in Saskatchewan, Canada, along with photos of the house they built themselves 30 years ago.  It’s a long letter, full of affection for the house in the telling of the tale of its construction and subsequent remodeling(s).  It appears, as we hoped, that the House of the 80’s ages well. 

"I still love my house.  My husband, Glenn, and I were young, dreaming of owning a house, when we saw this one.  We were 24 years old and had a two year old child and nothing in our bank account, but we wrote away for the plans ($11.00 for a set of three!) and kept them “just in case”.  We had been looking at older houses because we wanted something with character.  An opportunity came up to purchase a lot (with an old house to be demolished) in the neighborhood he had grown up in.  He loved his old neighborhood, and the school where he had gone was one block away.  Before we knew it, we had the lot, and we were digging the basement in April 1983.  A week later, we were informed there was another baby on the way.  The house would be completed before the baby!"  

Imagine how these houses must have changed over the years - with the passing of time and trends and changes of ownership. Don't you agree that it's "book-worthy"? 

"The years have flown by since that time, and we continue to love our home.  The basement has been completed with two extra bedrooms and a bathroom with a shower.  The yard has been landscaped – and landscaped – and will continue to be a work in progress.  We have redone carpets, repainted walls several times, and updated baseboards and the fireplace surround.  The boys have left home, and we turned their upstairs bedroom into our entertainment room."  

The former "kids room"

I’m still on the mission – to track down, photograph and document each and every one of the houses built from the roughly 10,000 plans (!) sold by Woman’s Day to folks looking to build small, energy-efficient and sustainable homes.  

"Please enjoy the pictures.  I have also included several of a birdhouse a friend had made for us many years ago.  He appreciated the uniqueness of our house."

the birdhouse

So, kind readers, please forward this to everyone you know and ask them to do the same.  We all know the internet is key to global-scale communications; going viral will certainly help me figure out how to start this noble quest!  Thanks, and enjoy!

"Please feel free to contact me at any time.  I would love to see what others have done over the years with this truly remarkable ‘little house’ plan."

So would we, Vicki & Glen in Saskatchewan, blessings to you! 

Lessons Learned

So, I had the “pleasure” of spending the last two months mostly, well, sitting.  Having been in a pretty rough car accident at November’s beginning, I spent the remainder of November and all of December recovering from some pretty painful injuries.  I must say that spending that much time “doing nothing” was quite a challenge for me, at least once the worst pain was over and my brain started functioning somewhat normally again.

What a challenge it is to “sit”.  As one who practices yoga and meditation, I am very aware of the extreme difficulty of just “sitting” with the practice, allowing the mind to become still and the body and spirit to benefit from that stillness.  One of the reasons that I understand so completely the hard work of just “being” is that in my real life I am anything but still.  I am the quintessential multi-tasker, having taken on many, many roles and challenges over the last three or four decades in addition to working and parenting three (now adult) children.  I am not one to spend time in front of the television or dvd player (though I do love theatre and movies).  I am not one who chooses to sit in the shade in the summer or indoors in these cold winters, but rather opts for gardening, walking, cross-country skiing, riding a bike or sailing under the changing skies of our Midwest climate.  And while I love to read, it’s one of those things that gets done, mostly, in the early morning with my coffee or late at night, just before I drift off to sleep.  Sitting is not my thing.

Suffice to say, I have learned some grace and earned some wisdom in these two months of stillness and healing. 

Lesson One:  I own no chair, sofa or cushion that really, truly, is comfortable for the long haul.  Can’t decide it that’s a design flaw issue or a flaw in my choice of furniture.  I suspect it's a little of both.  And you know, those cultures who choose not to use furniture but rely on their own bodies for resting, might just be on to something.

Lesson Two:  Goodness exists everywhere.  I was continually astonished at the well wishes, the prayers, the food and fellowship that came from seemingly everywhere in my community.  It was humbling to say the least, and gratifying as well.

Lesson Three:  My family is amazing.  Let me repeat that:  MY FAMILY IS AMAZING.  Husband and kids, sibs, in-laws, what a bunch of kind, caring supportive troopers.

"primary food" the gift of orchids

Lesson Four: There is no substitute for good friends.  You know, the ones who show up at the hospital, the ones who tend to your sorry self when you are anything but gracious and kind.  The ones who feed you, not just edibles, but also real, true soul food, or as my educators at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition define it, “primary food”.  I cannot imagine life without the nourishment of the wonderful women and men who Iove me, and I them.  

Lesson Five:  I rage frequently about the state of our nation’s health care system but I gotta tell ya, I’ve had great care from skilled medical professionals, even if I’m wincing at the bills coming in.  And I am certainly learning the value of Physical Therapy!

Lesson Six:  I have learned on a very physical level, that my yoga practice is key to my health.  I’ve long appreciated what yoga does for me mentally, but I know that my ability to deal with my injuries, and my subsequent healing, was greatly improved by the body strength and mental strength that existed prior to the accident. 

Lesson Seven:  BMW’s are tough vehicles – I’m convinced my 525 saved my life twice.  That car was a beauty and a dream to drive, but it’ll no longer take swiftly to any road.  So sad that my relationship with my favorite car ever had to end in this most unfitting way.  

being held captive at the county yard. . . .sigh

Lesson Eight:  The body is a miraculous thing.  Amazing how healing happens, how the body mends itself – OK, I admit I gave it time, attention and some minimal medication – but truly, the design of this miraculous hulk of bone, tissue, organs, blood, fluids is incomparable to anything we humans might contrive.  Humans, indeed, create the possibility for improving on the body and for fixing what ails it, but let’s face it, there’s some power out there a whole lot greater than all of us that came up with this amazing design.

‘nuff said.   


Namaste ~

Super Heroes

In the architecture office we’ve joked over the years that we specialize in “challenging projects”.  And it’s true. While many firms differentiate themselves by designing only schools, or museums, churches, or fast food restaurants, we’ve chosen to remain multi-disciplinary.  It could well be argued that this has hurt the firm over time – not getting a contract to design a local church, for instance, or to assist the local school districts in work we are especially good at, i.e., analyzing problems and designing solutions – simply because the firm doesn’t specialize in that field, does rip a chunk out of our collective heart each time.   It feels like failure, especially when the end result for that project we didn’t get is unattractive, doesn’t serve its occupants or community well, or is otherwise not up to par – the standards we’ve set for our own work over time are very high.

But, being a firm that “does everything” has its advantages.  We are proud that we’ve been able to save some historic buildings and restore them to their earlier glory.  We’re pleased that we’ve been a part of some wonderful community architecture projects – from large community centers to small pocket parks.  And, it’s been a true joy to be able to effect positive change in the living environments of people living in poverty or with a disability.

We know how to solve the problems presented to us by our clients and their buildings.  In the nearly 25 years we’ve been in business we’ve seen it all – crumbling foundations and wonky(now there’s an architectural term for you!) floor structures, buildings left uninhabitable from years of neglect and abuse, “re-muddled” historic buildings and storefronts, residential additions that detract rather than add to the value of a home.  We’ve made churches, offices, schools and retail settings accessible, we’ve brought countless buildings up to code, and we’ve added light, air and space to so many buildings it’s hard to even remember them all.  We’ve enhanced public facilities, like parks and historic attractions, we’ve created wonderful living spaces for seniors and playspaces for children, and re-designed interiors to improve functionality as well as aesthetics.  And along the way, we’ve designed some beautiful new homes and commercial buildings too – a completely different, yet just as satisfying, form of problem-solving through design.

One of the buildings we're working on "saving"!

And throughout all of it – the triage, the forensic study, the drawings, the construction, and yes, the frequent heartache and stress – we’ve come to realize that we are architects and planners, by trade and by talent, but we are in fact, “saviors” – we have found solutions to complicated, difficult building problems, and through effective communication, collaboration and thoughtful design, have saved buildings, rescued distressed owners, and delighted individuals and communities. 

Yeah, we’re kinda super-heroes.  

Designing for Community

Oh my, it’s three months since I’ve written.  Amazing how time flies, especially in the summer, and especially when we take on huge projects and a multitude of tasks.  Such has been the case for me since early June.  With the waning of summer, I find myself wondering where on earth the time has gone and must realize that the answer likes squarely with my inability to say “Thank you, no.”  I’ve taken on too much, I realize, and yet now that I’m in the thick of these efforts, I am unable to leave, unwilling to walk away from commitments to good community work. 

One of the efforts I’m working on has to do with community visioning and planning.  Designing, if you will, a new future for this community I’ve called home for the better part of my adult life.   This small city, once a bastion of wealth, beautiful homes and a thriving business community, has suffered for several decades now from a lack of foresight, a lack of looking ahead to the future, thinking through possible scenarios, planning for what could occur and what we might be.  Life is, to paraphrase John Lennon, what’s happened to us while we weren’t busy making other plans.  

And it shows.  Our downtown commercial district is tired – too many empty storefronts, too little investment over time in capital improvements, precious little youthful energy and talent stepping up to take the reigns in retail/restaurant/entertainment venues.   

Too many of our beautiful homes and neighborhoods, boasting grand Queen Annes, Italianates, Four-Squares, Federals, Greek Revivals, Bungalows and 20^th Century Moderns, suffer from deferred maintenance and the disrespect that comes from a lack of responsible ownership and pride.

Much of the wealth has drained away – siphoned off by multi-nationals who’ve left us, taking with them their investments in worthwhile causes like United Way along with their executives and their spouses who spent their disposable incomes on things like ballet classes for their kids and support for the schools, the arts, and recreation.  Collective wealth has been reduced by years of dis-investment in new business and industry and the employment they offer, all the while we were somehow unable to see it all coming, to plan ahead, to take some risks and invest.

It’s not too late.  Over the course of this summer, hundreds of citizens have come together to begin anew.  We’ve drafted a new vision, and are setting a new course for this community.  It has been at turns, exhilarating, exhausting, puzzling, challenging, joyful, luscious, and collaborative.  There’s been a noticeable lack of mean-spiritedness, and an amazing amount of gratitude and positive thinking.  We, many of us, realize this just might be our last chance to design the community in ways that feed us – all of us – for many years to come.  Feeds our souls, our bodies, and our spirits, and fills our pocketbooks and our government and community coffers too.

As a process designer and facilitator, this feels like a shining example of Margaret Mead’s famous quote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. 

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  

It’s a small group that started this process we’ve entitled "Prospering Together" but it grows every day with good folks coming together to listen, learn, grow, and craft a new future for our hometowns. 

It is a truism:  Design is everywhere and means everything to how we live, everyday.   Design is tactile, visual, yes.  But design is also invisible, impactful in ways we are often unaware.  This particular design promises a lot; the end results are up to us – use the design to prosper, or ignore it at our peril.

Musings on old and new

Everything old is new again, part uno.

Design and technology, like art and fashion, tend to be cyclical.  In fashion, hemlines go up and down, lapels get narrow or wide, as ties broaden or shrink.  Art leans towards excruciatingly modern as it leans away from realism or cubism.  Design and technology seem like they are always on the upward swing, signifying constant change, always fresh and new and, well, hip.  


And we hipsters, well, we like to think we keep up.  How unlikely it is that we do was brought home to me this week in two very different ways.  

My cell phone died an inglorious death over the weekend.  A slow, agonizing death as it lay, unbeknownst to me, all night long in a shallow pool of water resulting from the bouquet of flowers I’d bought as a gift for my dancer daughter’s last performance at Lawrence University.  We’ve all had lots of cell phones (and with luck have donated our old ones to our local domestic violence program or recycled properly).  But this phone I had grown to love – it was quite literally, a workhorse – and though it was ancient in cell phone time after over four years of hard use, I still loved it for its simplicity and its faithfulness to me.  It always worked, despite my sometimes less than caring attitude towards it.  

Of course, I’ve been eyeing the shiny new smart phones, the ‘droids, thinking how “connected”, how “efficient” I could be with a new phone in my pocket.  I loved this phone and its death saddened me.  But, oh joy! When I took it to the dealer, it was revived with just a simple battery change.  That, and the advice to “store it in some rice to dry it out.”  WHAT??!! How old school is that?!  I recall my mother advising rice kernels in salt shakers to stave off annoying salt-caking from our Midwest summer swelter.  Ancient technology!  Dutifully, I placed the phone in a Ziploc bag with rice . . . 

OK, maybe it requires more than an overnight session . . . I’m still waiting for the screen to look as clear as it once did.  I’m gonna give it another go tonight to see if old technology can complete the resurrection of a thoroughly modern device!  It struck me as odd that in this most advanced areas of technology, we still rely on the “old wives” methods to fix things.

Everything old is new again, part dos.

Thanks to the demise of our much loved hot tub, this spring we added on a new deck.  The old deck had been built around the hot tub many, many moons ago requiring the old tub to be hoisted out, leaving just a big square hole surrounded by decking boards.  Ugly.

The Architect Dad, Son (on the left) and
"Other Sons"

A few weeks back, our college student son and his friends worked with Dad to build the new deck, and we love it.  


It brings a whole new perspective to the back garden and added space for entertaining.  It also posed a dilemma – what to do with the space where once the table and chairs sat?

The view of the new deck from the upper deck
off the master bedroom 

So, I’ve had my eyes opened once again to the beauty of “modern” design – this being the "butterfly chair" designed originally in 1938 (!) by Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy, also known as the BKF and the Hardoy chair.  

I.Love.This.Chair!

For the past several years my architectural leanings have become decidedly modern, as I swoon over long, linear modern homes with wide open spaces, south-facing glass walls, gleaming stainless steel, aluminum, concrete, ceramic finishes and no clutter whatsoever.  This chair, resting dormant in my design memory somewhere, was awakened when I read a post from one of my favorite architectural bloggers.  

Can't you just see those butterfly chairs
in this empty space?!

Yes!  Everything old IS new again!  I’m saving my pennies now (catch the money-sucking reference to college-age children?!) so I can grace my deck with two (four?!) of these elegant, hip, and I suspect, comfortable! butterfly chairs. 

Perhaps you’ll join me for a sunset cocktail?

You Say You Want an Evolution?

A House for the 80’s

(1980’s, that is!)

Now why, you might ask, would I want to write about a house design from thirty years ago?!   Damn fine question, and I have a damn fine answer. 

Back in 1980-81, when my architect hubbie was still a struggling architecture student at the University of Illinois-Urbana, Woman’s Day Magazine sponsored a design competition – a House for the 80’s – for UI students, and, you guessed it, Chris won the competition.  Many months later, the house was built in beautiful Columbus, Indiana – home to buildings by many famous architects like Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Cesar Peli, I.M. Pei and others. 

The Cover

Touted on the magazine’s cover as a “Small House with Lovely Living Space”, the house Chris designed aimed to draw in an abundance of natural light and capitalize on solar gain with its broad southern exposure, open floor plan, simple layout and multi-use rooms.  His use of ceramic tile flooring and the masonry mass of the huge fireplace and chimney served to capture and hold the sun’s heat so that it could provide comforting warmth with less reliance on fossil fuels. 

That house design was the most popular plan ever published by Woman’s Day at the time of its release in March, 1982, having sold more copies than any other plan they had ever printed in the magazine.  I don’t know if anything has surpassed it, and don’t remember the exact number of plans sold, but I do recall the number 10,000-plus being tossed around.  It was 30 years ago, after all, and try as I might, my brain doesn’t retain bits of data as I might wish it would.  I do recall, quite clearly, the early autumn weekend we spent at the newly-built house in Columbus with the magazine’s staff of writers, photographers, interior designers and stagers, as they captured in photographs every nook and cranny, inside and out, for publishing in the spring.  We felt very fortunate indeed to be a part of that event and enjoyed every glamorous moment!  The photo below was scanned from the original magazine.

A bearded young Chris Fye 
with some of the crew

We’ve been thinking a lot about that house lately, for a few reasons.  The first is that we still – yes, even as recently as last week – receive emails out of the blue from people who bought the set of plans all those many years ago, and have held onto them until they could build their “dream house”.  Or from folks who are getting ready to construct and have a design question or a tweak they’re interested in.  Or, some who lost the plans or never got them ordered and hope that we can send a copy (we can – we, of course, retained a set!).  Throughout the nation as well as in areas like Baffin Island and Nova Scotia in Canada, the simple design of Chris’s House of the 80’s just really resonated with people – it bespeaks home and hearth more than many house plans, and certainly more so than the “McMansions” popular in the last decade or so. 

Chris explaining his model

From the editor's column

The second reason the House for the 80’s is on our minds is the resurgence of “green” thinking – of looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our use of fossil fuels, and reduce our cost of living as fuel prices continue to rise.  We’ve been tossing around ideas about how we would design that house today.  While much would remain the same, some changes are inevitable after thirty years of practice and design leadership, and other changes are possible now thanks to improvements in materials and technology advances.  

This small house focused on “livability” and on quality, something akin to Sarah Susanka’s Not So Big House movement, quite a while before Ms. Susanka broke on the residential architecture scene.  Were we to design a “House for the Early 21^st Century” it would still be on the smallish side, with attention to detail, quality craftsmanship and a thoughtful focus on how people actually live in their homes.

The kitchen with "herb garden bay window" 
above sink

The massive "heat sink" chimney

And third, we want to launch an effort to research all of those houses built from that popular set of plans sold by Woman’s Day.  It would be fascinating to see how people adapted the plans to meet their needs or their climate, and how the houses have “evolved” over time as families grew or shrank, and ownership changed.  What an interesting story each home could tell, and each family would have as they built the house, made it home, and then, perhaps, moved on or remodeled to suit emerging needs. 

Right now, we're researching how to begin the process of doing the work – finding the houses that were built, traveling to those towns, documenting, and finally, publishing a monograph to lovingly depict the evolution of the House for the 80’s.  If you have ideas, let us know! 

The House for the 80's photographed in 1981 

A private deck for the master suite

The House for the 80's photographed in early 1990's
the color's changed and a second stall was added to the garage