The Yule Blog

by Craig Claus

Alright, what’s the deal with the prior posts on comprehensive design? Is one house really all that different from another? As long as there’s enough rooms to cover the basics of cooking, sleeping, bathing, and television watching, why should we spend time and money on customized design? Isn’t the house a proven product?

I think we are seeing that the house is not a static commodity. I’ve been in many new houses that are just places for cooking, sleeping, bathing, and watching tv; they are not warm places of refuge and not any place that families or friends want to gather. Even prior to the green building trend, many home owners started looking at designing places that work with a scaled-down lifestyle. They found that the formal living and dining rooms weren’t being used, and that the “open concept” reaction was not providing a comfortable space that had the quality of shelter. The scale of daily human life is not encompassed in the push to minimize cost per square foot.

I recently toured a home touted as the “21st century green home”. It was really the same old home-in-a-box with “green” technologies and materials applied to it. That’s a good first step, but definitely not a comprehensive design. Site orientation, roof overhangs, and window positions were not even considered. There was a huge room over the garage that was just eating up space and bloating the square footage number. The most basic step in creating a “green” home should be mating the design of the structure to the technology and materials, rather than retrofitting green products to stock plans. Designing a place that encourages the owners to think, reflect, and live through the quality of the space is really the ultimate goal. People that are contemplative and love life and liberty will do more for our society and environment than a well-intentioned intellectual preoccupied with just making it through the day or week.

Can we create a home that helps the human spirit to thrive?