House and Home as a Journey

While a house is a journey, a home is a journey also. A home is about making a house into one’s home. At Building Arts we believe that a house is more than a collection of rooms (even well decorated ones), and while your house may constitute your arrival home, it is also continuation of your own journey. A good home design should facilitate this journey, and it can do this in a number of ways.

The extent to which your house supports your life includes not only the comfortable and secure places into which you can retreat, but also those that incorporate passage or mystery.

A window, for example can simply be an opening in the wall, or it can be a place for your imagination to reside.

A window can also be a place to rest.

A wall may be punctuated with doors or windows.

One’s journey can be enhanced by creating discrete yet interconnected rooms.

Long views with marker points which break the view into segments make a house feel larger without feeling voluminous.

Through the hint of a room beyond, rather than simply a door into a room, we create the feeling of passage to that room.

Why should a house be a journey? For one thing it is analogous to each of our lives as a journey. We reside in our house and our house resides in us. 

The idea of the permanence of one's home within ourselves is poignantly expressed in this NYTimes essay by Alan Wightman, The Ghost House of My Childhood, in which the author describes a return to his childhood home:

I turn onto West Cherry Circle, drive past familiar houses. Flowers are blooming, it’s spring. But something is wrong. The house isn’t here. There’s a hole in space where the house used to be. Slowly, I inch up the driveway and park the car. Something is terribly wrong. I feel as if I’m not in my body any longer. My body is a distant, cold moon. There was a two-story house here, with pink brick walls and a porch with white posts and dormer windows. I can see right through the empty air to bushes and trees on the other side. And on the ground where the house was, new grass. Not a single brick or splinter or piece of debris.

A home is a journey as with traveling. Imagine yourself on a train, which is a room moving through the landscape or the city, on the way to your destination. If you are feeling delight or anticipation in your travel, this is not unlike the way you might feel moving about a well designed home—a journey, even though your house is not moving. At Building Arts, we strive to achieve this feeling of delight as you, the homeowner, move through your own home.