In Praise of the Imperfect Home

 

A home is a keeper of memories. We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go in our home-imprints of our bare feet on wood floors, smudges on windows, rings from chilled glasses etched into our stone counters. Children do so in a much larger and exuberant way as I was later to find out - witnessing my own young daughters as they eagerly fulfilled their curiosity about the spaces and furniture of our home. The evidence that they exist in this visual and tactile way is to me expressive and quite beautiful but to others, perhaps messy and destructive.   

 

A home is a continually evolving concept. Like life, it is forever in flux with next days unknown. My objective always is to not "over-design". There is a certain heavy handedness and prescriptiveness to homes that are "over-designed" where the designer's signature can be found everywhere. The balance between creating beautiful and functional spaces as well as environments that allow for and celebrate the expansion and compression of life and the inevitable transformations of its inhabitants is where my true aspiration lies.

 

With every completed project, I hope that I have left enough of the place, to some extent, open and ready to accept the owners’ way of making that space their own.  In that sense, a good home is like a good story, open-ended, perfectly imperfect, still unfolding in the reader’s mind long after the last sentence has been read.