EMOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE

Looking inside to uncover what makes a house a home.

These questions seem frivolous on the surface, but after twenty-five years of helping people design, build and remodel their homes, I’ve become convinced that understanding the “emotional architecture” a client brings to a project is a critical part of designing a house that feels like a “home.”

In the architecture firm with which I am associated, we are trying to develop a technology that tailors our projects to the true natures of our clients, but it’s not easy. The issue of “home” is a highly emotional one. Logic seldom comes into it. The fact is, when most people decided to remodel their home or build a new house...they lose their minds!

It’s true. Stable marriages topple like palm trees in the hurricane of home improvement. Pleasant, cooperative homemakers turn into Machiavellian harpies, combating husbands who vow to fight to the death on the ramparts of their own financial Alamos.

Practical, down-to-earth CPA’s suddenly realize they are the reincarnation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Customers lie about their budgets, trying to bargain with the designer as though they were buying their house from a Tijuana sombrero salesman. Perfectly reasonable people, who would never dream of telling their doctor how to treat a disease or their lawyer how to draft their will, think nothing of telling a professional architect how to design their home.

Worst of all, when people begin the process of designing a new home, they forget the basic laws of economics. I long ago discovered that when customers who were over budget came to my office to “trim the fat,” they were actually going to add a Jacuzzi, upgrade the ceramic tile, change the plastic laminate countertops to granite, and then expect the price to drop.

It set me to wondering.

One day I experienced an epiphany. I was converting a group of historic buildings in Round Top into a country inn. The Queen and my kids were still in Houston. Every Monday morning I drove up to Round Top and then drove home to Houston every Friday night. In between, I slept on an air mattress on the second floor of an old pier and beam house, one of several we were restoring.

Alone all week, I had plenty of time to think. In the evenings I would sit in a old rocking chair on the wood plank porch. I found myself inexplicably happy. Everything seemed right with the world as I rocked on that porch. I began to ask myself why...and before long I uncovered the source of my unexplained peace of mind.

I remembered a place from my childhood..., my great grandfather’s porch. I called him “Nandaddy.” I can still see him dressed in overalls, bending down to pick me up, a broad smile on his face. “Come hug my neck,” he would say.

When I was a young child, I spent a lot of time on that porch. I cannot remember a time in my life when I felt more loved or appreciated.

He and my grandmother lived in a pier and beam farmhouse in Milam County. It had a wood plank porch which wrapped around three sides. Years later, the architectural features of a similar porch in Round Top brought back unconscious memories of that cherished time. I had discovered a key feature of my emotional architecture!

Suddenly I understood why I kept returning to historic restoration work even though, truth be told, it was less profitable than my other building ventures.

I realized then that we all view the world through a broad set of internal associations most, but not all, from our childhood. This internal landscape determines how we respond emotionally to the architecture in our surroundings.

Now, eight years later, I live in another old farmhouse. I’m happy and feel very much at home. Built in the 1840’s, the restoration is still not complete. The downstairs is cold in the winter and the upstairs is a hothouse in the summer. Bugs find it easy to get in and the AC finds it easy to get out.

The old place requires constant maintenance. You would think these things would be annoying, but I sit on my porch in the evenings and think about how lucky I am.

You see, its not just an old German farmhouse to me. It’s the place where I raised my two youngest children. Those old walls hold the accomplishment I feel at having been able to leave the big city and make a new home in the country. My best girl sleeps there in a bed I made with my own hands. It’s a place filled with memories of all the good times I’ve had with the people I love.

I have come to realize that these emotional associations are the actual bricks and mortar of my experience of “home.” It’s obvious if you think about it. A robin takes great care to build a nest and guards it jealously until her chicks have flown away. Then, that cherished nest is just another pile of sticks. We humans are not that much different. A house is a material object. A “home” is of the heart.

With this key realization guiding the way, I began to seek a technology to uncover the features of my client’s emotional architecture. It seemed to me, that if a designer could uncover the emotional associations of his client, he would discover powerful clues to a design that would create that illusive and individual experience we call “home.”

In his profound book, The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander says “The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead they keep us locked in inner conflict.”

Mr. Alexander’s theory says that architecture gains aliveness by reflecting the patterns of behavior of those who inhabit it. In other words, the day to day repetitive actions, events and activities of human beings, naturally organize space in a way that is healing and nurturing. When those patterns are ignored, he suggests, we have the type of architecture that now fills our cities...dead, mechanical boxes, impersonal and cold.

So, perhaps it is possible, as Mr. Alexander believes, to bring humanity to architecture. If this is true, then it seems to me that the unconscious world of emotion that lives within us must be a primary source for much of our design criteria.

Now, years after I had that first realization, I remain far from my goal. The human mind is complex and my skills are limited. Still, the meager successes I have enjoyed make me even more excited about the possibilities in this line of inquiry.

I am a builder and restoration contractor, not an architect, but a while back, I joined forces with a registered architect and a CAD expert. We formed a design firm. In our firm, we make it clear to our clients that a successful design is the result of a good partnership between the designer and the client. My partners and I may know a lot more about architecture and construction than our customers, but our clients are the experts on their own values, tastes, lifestyle and budget.

Time and again however, we find that clients approach us with a broad set of assumptions about cost and design, assumptions that are often poorly grounded in fact. These misconceptions tend to color their requests, often causing them to misrepresent their needs and desires. In other words, people usually think they know what they want, but are often wrong.

Over time we have found it important to serve as a “devil’s advocate” and challenge our clients’ preconceived ideas if we were to truly discover their most basic priorities.

Because of these issues, it soon became obvious to us that if we were sincere about trying to get at these deeper issues within our customers, and not just impose our own design ideas on them, we would have to take them on a journey of discovery.

As a means of getting past these surface assumptions, I created a set of exercises we call “Homework.” We ask our clients to complete that worksheet for us as part of the design process.

First I tell them, that to do the exercise properly, they must rid their minds of all previous assumptions. What we look for in the first portion of their “Homework” is an unedited, purely emotional response. I tell them to imagine that money is no object, that they have endless funds; that there are no engineering or architectural limitations. They can build anything they want. There is no need to make the architecture or décor consistent. They can have anything they desire!

With that attitude in mind, I ask them to create a notebook. It can be a simple loose-leaf notebook, a set of folders or a binder, depending on the time they want to spend. I ask them to label each section to contain the major areas of their project...for instance:

Each person has a unique relationship with the aesthetics of space and form based on a number of factors, most of which are unconscious and purely emotional. If these items can be identified, and included in their design, we believe they will feel psychologically more at home in their new space.

We also ask our clients about other issues in order to determine their individual values. I explain that, just like a person, a house has values. These values, just like the values our parents used to raise us, should guide the design. If they do not, we end up with a child we might not be proud of, or even one we don’t want to live with.

Values in homes are items like quality of materials, historical or architectural integrity, low maintenance, energy efficiency, aesthetics and cost. Sadly, these values are all competing for the available dollars. In other words, the more you pursue one, the less you get another. Reducing the maintenance requirements of a home is likely to increase the cost and can impact the aesthetics, etc.

Each family, each client, has a unique set of values, some practical and some emotional. To tailor a design effectively, one must first identify these values and then prioritize them.

Couples are often unaware of the impact that architectural issues have on their relationship. I sometimes tell a story about a couple for whom I designed a project a while back. It was an addition that included a master suite. As I usually do when designing a master bath for a couple, I had drawn a vanity with “his and her” sinks.

They liked the design but the wife assured me they did not need to go to the expense of having an extra sink installed in their bath. She said they were used to a single sink and that was all they would need.

I played devil’s advocate and began to ask them about their habits in the mornings. After a while, I discovered they had an argument almost every day while preparing for work. However, the wife explained, their conflict had nothing to do with the sink. It was her husband’s fault. He always left his whiskers in the basin when he shaved!

Neither of them had been able to see that it is much easier to add a sink to a bath than to change the habits of a spouse!

That may seem obvious, but I have found that such oversights are common. Almost all of us find it hard to separate the forest from the trees when it comes to our immediate surroundings.

In this same vein, I had a customer who refused to design in appropriate storage because his wife would “stack things everywhere anyway.”

That’s what’s called a “self-fullfilling prophecy.

I have had several customers who resisted considering accounting for the wall space required by their heirloom furnishings...saying they would “just work that out when they moved in.”

This decision works fine, as long as you don’t mind your sideboard sitting in front of a window or sticking out into a doorway.

I have had clients who, when planning to put more than one building on a site, fought the idea of designing the two buildings at the same time...even though the two buildings were supposed to share utilities, functions and architectural styles.

We smile about such things in the office but the truth is, professionals are prone to the same behavior when it comes to their own homes and projects. The mind is full of mischief. 

I am legendary for leaving projects unfinished around my own home. I use entirely different standards of quality for myself and my home than the standards I use for my clients. Don’t ask me why. There’s something about working on my own place that makes me crazy.

The experience of “home” is close to the heart, inextricably intertwined with safety and comfort and family. Complicated emotions come into play when the issue is on the table. Adding to the potential stress is the fact that decisions about the design and cost of our homes are the single most important financial decisions of our lives.

The pressure is on. The emotional fire is hot. Building and remodeling our homes can lead to considerable stress.

But the story can have a happy ending. Sometimes dreams do come true... and dream homes. In our hearts is a special place. Surrounded by the memories, special attachments and fond impressions that create our emotional architecture...is a warm and comfortable sanctuary just waiting to be discovered.

It’s called “home.”

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