But in me haste to do the job, I was too blind to see
That a barrel full of building bricks was heavier than me

— Dubliners, The Sick Note

This post is part of a series about building a house that looks and feels traditional in New Hampshire. However, this post can be read by itself.

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — Making choices

7. Light — Designing for Light

8. Mistakes ← You are here

9. Kitchen ← next

In 2018 we built a 30x38 foot house among some overrun haying fields. Our chief design considerations were to make something that had all the qualities we loved about old houses, while remaining within a fairly limited budget. Here’s what it looks like today:

The black barn in the back is The Goose Palace

This post is a catalog of mistakes and things we wish we did differently.

Topics covered:

Mistakes of Design and Budget

Easy to Fix if We Thought of It Sooner

Finish and Lighting

Kitchen Mistakes

Logistics Mistakes

What worked well

Mistakes of Design and Budget

If I could go back in time I would have increased our budget by just a few thousand dollars to improve a few more things around the edges. If you are trying to make a truly special place to dwell for decades, the return of spending a little more is worth it.

We couldn’t realistically increase it by much, however, so many of our big decisions really were compromises. Before I get into our mistakes, it is worth mentioning a few things that were not mistakes, but would be mistakes if you were trying to copy a house design like ours, and your budget was larger.

• We could not consider many features that would make our house more interesting. There is no complex geometry and little detail. Shutters, a more refined entryway, a back porch, 3rd story dormers, and more interior carpentry (custom millwork, built-ins, etc) would all have been lovely additions.

• Distance is a luxury in house design: Quiet places to retreat and seclude yourself, even when a loud party is going on, are exceptionally nice and I would recommend building them into your design if you have the ability. We did not. We had just enough budget to build a 30x38 box. So the design lacks length and distance, and the particular nature of winding-ness that we find very appealing in some grand old houses.

• We spent a lot on windows, and love natural light, but I don’t think an intense sunny-ness everywhere is ideal. Because our house geometry is so simple, there are no secluded nooks or shadowy spaces. There are not a lot of places indoors with softer light, or variations in light.

These are (I hope) temporary mistakes. We built our house with the intention of adding on to it later, and we can improve these over time. But if at the start our budget had an extra zero, we might have built something like this or this, rather than our austere design.

Then there are sort-of budget, sort-of design flaws. For example, with no closets and a tiny mudroom and no garage, we predicted that storing bicycles would be annoying and we’d just had to accept this. But we were slightly more surprised to find that that there was no great place to store a vacuum or a baby stroller either! We simply didn’t think of those objects. So our stroller mostly sits in our front hall, and the vacuum floats around from room to room. This is not that bad, but they’re big objects that simply skipped our mind when designing the house. Of course, if we had a bigger mudroom or more space for built-in storage (or a lighter stroller that folded better), it wouldn’t be a problem at all, so these are unlikely to be an issue in other people’s designs.

Easy to Fix if We Thought of It Sooner

It’s important to remember that every decision you do not make is a decision that someone else in the process may “default” for you, and this happens at your peril, or at least your expense.

Read more

While looking over some garden inspiration at the end of March, it came to me that this might be a good year to enclose the orchard. I adore all kinds of hedges and garden walls: open space is very good, but rooms, even nooks, outdoor places with structure and privacy, these are even better.

Stone or brick walls are out of the question, but I wondered if it might be possible to make a hornbeam hedge that partly encloses the orchard, in an L-shape, with the stream and the forest on the other boundaries. Hedges were one of our first hopeful ideas when we bought the land, but (like a lot of hopeful outdoor plans) they were soon dropped as we realized the scope of outdoor work that needed to come first.

American and European (carpinus betulus) hornbeam are both a very dense wood with a nice habit, though European is preferred for hedges. They are unfussy about soil acidity, don’t mind moisture, and can tolerate shade fairly well, all three of which are necessary for this particular spot. Hornbeam grows slowly, which is somewhat a downside, but it also means the hedge maintenance won’t overwhelm me. The time will pass anyways.

As I began researching where to buy, I was dismayed to find that many wholesalers of hornbeam were sold out of some larger hedging specimens for the year. The reason for this is that many wholesalers ship their final shipment the first week of April (this is around when many retail nurseries in New Hampshire might open for the year). Other ones had huge specimens (6-7 feet tall) for $280 each, but this would mean I could only buy a few, and trucking costs would further infringe on the budget.

But I did find one nursery in Oregon that had listed 3/8” caliper (trunk measurement) hornbeam for just $3.20 each. One minor problem is that their regular season was over, they would make a shipment in early April, but without warranty. Another problem is that the minimum order is $750, which meant I would need to buy at least 240 tree saplings. This is much more than I needed or thought I could reasonably plant. And lastly they were likely to be quite small, maybe just a foot high, so it would take 5-10 years before it looks like a real hedge.

Still, if I didn’t order 240 saplings, I would forfeit my chance to get something in the ground this year. Because of the slow growth, I want as many years in the ground as possible, and the uncertain possibility of buying larger specimens next year also comes with a correspondingly larger cost. So why not try? I ordered the 240, and called a friend with a tractor to ask for some help with land prep.

My plan was simple: the tractor can rough up the L-shape, approximately 240 feet, by turning over the grass (picking it up and putting it back down). I would order 7 yards of compost, and he would lay this on top of the line. At the same time he could use a little dirt from the far field to raise a low spot by a few inches. Finally I would top-dress the planting area with 6 yards of mulch.

My plan was also untested. I assumed that by breaking the sod layer and putting down a lot of compost, it would be easy enough to stick in 240 saplings without a lot of shovel or pickaxe work for each one. I am also (present day) assuming the compost and mulch will keep them protected, to need only a little watering, and that planting directly into this compost wouldn’t burn the roots. I’ve bought compost from this local place before so I am reasonably sure it would be aged enough.

I had to do a lot of raking and some shoveling to clean up the rough tractor work, which took about five hours of labor. Then the day the hornbeam arrived, I unboxed them and soaked them in bins — they were in transit for three days and just coming out of dormancy, so this is the expected thing to do for bare root plants. After a minimum 30 minutes in the tub, I got to work.

They are spaced 2 feet apart, with a second staggered row stacked behind. This seemed like the most reasonable way to use the large number I had to work with. So effectively there is one hornbeam per foot. I probably should have spaced the two rows wider apart, but because I was planting within where the tractor did most of the work, they might be tighter than the ideal.

The work took about six or seven hours, planting and mulching, with some mulching left for day two. Some areas of the line were quick, but others required more work to ensure a prepared seedling site. But it was a reasonable amount for one person to plant in one day on prepped land. As always, now that I’ve done it, I would be faster the next time.1

Completed, it looks like very little except up close:

The specimens are good and I’m very happy with the wholesaler, Heritage Seedlings. Only a single one had damage.

Cost breakdown

240 Hornbeam — $768

UPS 3-day shipping — $260

7 yards of compost — $334

6 yards of mulch (it turned out I needed less mulch) — $285

Hiring friend with tractor — Approximately $500, I had him do some other work (moving brush and small pine trees) while here, so its hard to be precise with this cost.

So the hedge cost approximately $2,147. If I bought the 6-to-7 foot hornbeams, I would have only been able to buy ~8 plants for the same price.

~ ~ ~

I ended up using 224 saplings for the length of the hedge, ending by the forest in a pentagon shape, and giving some room for an opening in each line. With the remaining saplings I planted a circle on the other side of the field.

It might (eventually) make an interesting shape for children to hide inside of, or else a kind of sculpture for a rose or two to ramble through. But more likely if there are any problem seedlings on my hedge, I will be taking from here to replenish the line.

The final four saplings I planted farther away from the house, in a spot that I might forget about. Maybe I’ll rediscover them midsummer, or years later, when they start to grow and give more color.

~ ~ ~

see also: The Goose Palace, Everything I know about gardening, Why make something beautiful?

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

— Dr. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

It has been six years since our house was complete-enough to move in, though we are still incrementally finishing. Last year was the first summer I really turned my attention to gardening.

Improving an existing garden allows one to build upon coherence, to work within a plan, and to work slowly. Starting a garden from nothing — cutting every bed, making stone walls and level sections, selecting every plant — is a little more intimidating. If you don’t want to wait a decade, big commitments are necessary. Despite the benefits to starting early, for the first years I gave the gardens little attention beyond some sporadic experiments. I had more than enough outdoor work to do just taming the nearby land back into fields and putting together a small orchard.

But I am now ready for bigger commitments. The more I expand the gardens outward from the house, the stranger it seems not to try something ambitious. Why not lay out something so big that the design will take years, something unusually lush, mass plantings of roses and small flowers and fruit, and try to make something really beautiful?

So I am going to create a rose garden, a little stately near the house, a little sprawling as it enters the fields. I want to make it visible enough that it can become a public adornment of my town. It should start out front, close to the road.

So far (in mostly 2024) I have planted 97 rose bushes. Not 97 different kinds, I am interested in a good deal of massing, so I often plant in sets of at least 3 to give a larger appearance. They are:

And for this coming spring I have ordered 39 more, so far:

This will take some time. These and the roses that follow will take some years to reach a mature size. I really don’t know what is manageable by one person. It is an eternal conceit of civilization to build beyond one’s grasp, to find out what is possible to maintain only by doing too much. So at least I am in good company.

I expect this to take a good deal of time in building and upkeep. Big ornamental gardens are usually considered as the work of institutions, or else retired people. But I don’t want to wait until I’m elderly to contemplate and enjoy something so sweet, and a big part of the appeal is the creation of something my children will enjoy while they are still children.

I want to make a world that is full of the work of magic for them, full of beautiful places to play and find each-other. This extends beyond roses of course, to the orchard, the meadows and streams, the barns I build, and all the hidden places those things create together.

And of course I want to make a home that is full of good work and full of good work for them to do. I believe that making beautiful things matters, that the effort is worth it, and I want them to see this with their own eyes and hands.

~ ~ ~

There is an initial outlay — in addition to roses I have bought and planted over three thousand bulbs, mostly species tulips and daffodils, to say nothing of the other garden companions. And much more will be spread out over the coming years as budget and time sensibly permit. But I think that the beauty of most places is not actually proportional to the expense, rather its in the care and the selection. After all many places of magnificent budgets nonetheless have quite barren landscaping (in fact, when I visited the mansions of Newport, I was surprised how many had almost no flowers. Instead many had entirely shrub-based gardening, which I now see as characteristic of so many American homes). And in the nearby institutional rose gardens I do see — like Fuller Gardens on the New Hampshire coast, or the Boston rose garden near the fens — I confess that for all their advantages of labor and budget and machinery, they don’t strike me. They look more like chambers of specimens, rather than places to view as a whole. As if their curators decided to create some drawers instead of rooms.

As a display of hundreds of rose varieties they fulfill their mission, but I want to avoid a focus on roses without any focus on fittingness.1 These gardens have no affordance for seclusion, no use of shadows, no outdoor "rooms", and few companions. This makes them feel separate, almost antiseptic. Can careful work and planning alone make something better? Possibly that’s a delusional thought, but it’s one I want to try.

~ ~ ~

One last reason. Since ancient days people have acted on an impulse to build temples and gardens and other places of inexpressible magnificence, at whatever scale they could, from the Acropolis to the roadside shrine. Perhaps our ancestors would think it strange that we, with our unimaginable riches and comforts of the future, scarcely care to build such things. I think it no surprise that we do not find nymphs, or other creatures of pure poetry, if we do not build fountains for them to haunt. The ancient impulse has always struck me as intuitive, now I have the means to try.

I want to create something that lures the divine.

If you are a paid subscriber, you are probably already adopting a rose, so thank you.

“It is a mistake to suppose a man makes a fortune if he knows not how to enjoy it.”

— Vauvenargues

In housing, almost every buy-vs-rent discussion concentrates on cost. Renters must consider losing out on equity and appreciation. Buyers must consider insurance, taxes, closing costs (both when buying and selling), repairs, etc. There are lengthy articles, discussions, and interactive calculators about this dilemma, but they’re fixated on an entirely economic calculus. If you are in a position to seriously consider the question (and are reasonably sure of your financial discipline and algebra skills), I think these resources are something of a distraction.

Housing is an aesthetic question as much as it is an economic one. You are not selecting a financial vehicle, but how you want to live. For instance, you might value a kind of environmental permeability — ensuring it is very easy to go indoors and outdoors dozens of times per day. Perhaps you work from home and simply want to stroll in and out of nature. Perhaps you have a dog or a child who wants to do the same. I value this greatly: the number of steps from my kitchen or my studio to bare grass and flowers should be as few as possible. Rather than travel to a park, I can open a window and hear my children in the sandbox, while I continue working, cooking, or relaxing. There is a corresponding permeability to much city life: while you may not be able to step from an apartment door into quiet greenery, you can walk to stores, cafes, parks, etc much more easily. These are both luxuries (many places have neither feature), and they carry an expense, but they are not caught in the calculus of buy-vs-rent.

Apartment living has many benefits that might be considered costly, but are often worth it. You are generally paying more than owning because you are paying someone else to assume risk. Houses also carry a cost of complexity: Many people do not want to manage their own lawns, roofs, boilers, septic systems, etc. These go beyond economic costs, they also take time and scheduling, even if you hire out every job. No calculator can input these considerations for you, you must think hard about your own desires and consider the tradeoffs yourself.

~ ~ ~

When we bought land in 2018, it had been on the market for about two years. It was judged too expensive per-acre to be worth its location or difficulties. Since we were the buyers, we of course overpaid for it, biting into our house budget. It can be difficult to not feel a little foolish if you purchase something everyone else has passed over. Possibly they know something you don’t.

With a few years of retrospect, that transaction let me realize something. Whenever I seek to get a deal (such as when furniture hunting), I often end up finding a deal. But I tend to do so by accepting something adequately disappointing. By contrast when I am excited enough to be willing to overpay, I am almost always grateful for my lapse in frugality.

If you spend your days indoors, or away from home, and home is simply a place to park a car and sleep, the land was almost certainly not worth it. We thought the land could be made worthwhile, and moreover that we would use it: we would return the scrubby forests to fields and then into gardens, we would take advantage of the village proximity by walking every day. We would make something pretty enough to be considered part of the adornment of the village. Without these desires, its just a lot for a house. With them, there’s no substitute.

There’s a quote from Burke, found in Letter to a Noble Lord:

Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection.

I find this widely applicable. Cost is a variable, but it’s a mistake to consider it the only one. If you look too hard at economizing, you might start to downplay significant desires. Should you buy or rent? Do you want to build things in a garage? Do you want a pub to walk to? Do you want neighbors, lodgers, children? Do you already have a spouse? By all means look at the calculator, eventually.

But think of everything else you can, first. It shouldn’t be a short list.

I have been sharing pictures of flowers growing around my house, mostly little things like poppies and roses, or my fields, and several people have asked me to write about gardening, or for gardening advice. But this request encounters a ridiculous shortcoming: I know almost nothing about gardening!

I have for years mostly experimented haphazardly. Sometimes this results in very nice appearances, which get photographed, but often it doesn’t. I think project failures sometimes warrant showing also but even my failures have been too bland to report. My experimentation has lead to a large amount of doing and then undoing, and the “undo” is much more labor in the physical world than on a screen. I do it all the same. Part of what I admire about ornamental gardening is that exceptional gardens require a certain amount of labor. I do not have immense resources, but I do have that. Of course that labor isn’t usually moving blueberries and hydrangeas and large stones around like a madman. I will get there.

But I have spent, in some years, $300 on various poppy seeds alone, only to see them vanish into the ground. I have spent the same the next year, after tilling first, only to see a scant few come up (though other flowers covered for them, that year). I have discovered many things through such dubiously effective trial and error. In this case, the front field needed lime. Also that consistent irrigation is not optional for seedlings when drought persists.

My preferred way of creating things is to learn by doing, but it does have drawbacks. With gardening, besides digging up a lot of plants to move them, an experimental mentality includes an inherent hesitation to make big moves. This can be acceptable as a way to bide time and think through what one really wants. But eventually one wants to increase the intensity.

It is only this year that a clear idea has come to me for an ornamental setup. It will primarily be a rose garden, with a few other messy beds for herbs and bunches of things. The farther from the house will still be wild in every direction, though I intend to plant drifts of a few bulbs. This fall and winter I’ll spend considerable time planning and reading more (and planting the two thousand bulbs I ordered1).

Despite my failures so-far, and not much yet that’s showy, my thinking for what will make a good garden has coalesced around a few uncomplicated principles. Here they are.

Grow what you would like to cut and take inside

The joy of a garden comes from the use of it, inside and out, ornamental and culinary. The first thing we planted was a small herb garden up the hill, where we can quickly run out at breakfast to fetch things like chives for scrambled eggs. In the midst of a dozen experiments, this has been a success since day one.

When thinking about what to plant, consider foremost what you’d want to harvest. This is a good way to make use of even a tiny garden. And this means not just singular flowers but whole branches of crabapple blossoms, sage and catmint blossoms with their foliage, lilacs, wild roses, etc.

One of the reasons I am moving towards roses is that I desire them so much indoors. They are a visceral delight at every distance.

Mow less

Keep big sections untouched for month or two at a time if you can. This lets you experiment with shaping, and using your land in different ways. It’s also less work, and more resilient under drought conditions.

There is an aliveness to fields that lawns do not have. Our small patio on a hill overlooks the tall grasses, which attract many birds and dance in the wind. Paths through fields are a simple way to capture a slight feeling of enclosure, you go from walking over the land to walking through the land.

“If you have just so much money, spend it all on one variety and make a big splash.”

Tasha Tudor said this. I believe it with my whole heart, for more than just gardening. This doesn’t mean you cannot start small or experiment, but if you are, once you have something that feels like it is really working, you should press into it with emphasis.

Bad gardens are often about insensitivity to context

A garden is not made magical by plants alone, but by its ability to generate moods and feelings, such as those of bounty and enclosure. This is partly why much modernist gardening (or “landscaping”)—that spaces a few plants apart in a bed of mulch, almost to show off the mulch as much as the plants—falls flat.

Two house corners follow, clearly not comparable, but its worth thinking of the decisions involved that make them so incomparable:

This looks as it does not because anyone thinks it is pretty (I hope), and not because its maintenance free, but because the design allows for low-context maintenance. The ocean of mulch is not designed for the viewer, but for the maintainer, so he can see it better. Among the sea of mulch and harsh edging, anyone can understand what needs to be done to make it look “correct”. Pull the weeds that are not the little shrubs. Cut grass along the curve. Mow. Spray. Done. The focus is not on vegetation fitting in, but making sure vegetation is easy to remove. It less resembles a garden than a perpetual horticultural demolition site. There are no cuttings to take here, and no strolling through.

With only sparse shrubs, anyone can come in and weed and mulch it without needing to understand the slightest thing. One’s lawn service company or personnel could change weekly and it could still be kept up easily. But if you want something really beautiful, you need to have someone willing to learn the patterns of your garden, or you need to do it yourself.

This is quite a bit different on the effort scale, but its worth considering what makes this house corner prettier, and with less need of mulch or edging. Instead there are high context decisions: When do you prune the roses? How do you shape the hedges? And in the thicker beds on the right, you need to know, each year, what is a weed and what will become a desirable flower. While not comparable in ease it is worth pointing out just what tasks that the modern landscaper has explicitly unburdened from himself. And then ask yourself: Do you really want to make these tradeoffs?

The first image can be maintained by anyone (or any landscaping company staffed by anyone). To maintain the second image, one must cultivate a sensitivity to context, in order to know what will work. The gardening can then focus on fitting in, instead of removing. This scene does not necessitate a master gardener to keep. It requires only time and attention, the same ingredients that create any intimacy. It would, in hands such as mine which are full of other tasks, also be a weedier place. In may not be as prim as a perfect garden, but even so it will have all the signs of bursting with life.

I want to make something living.

~ ~ ~

I will keep a record of my grand rose garden experiments. I cannot write what I know, as the phrase goes, but I can write what I’m learning. This year as I said is mostly planning.

I hope to write again very soon, about the act of reading. Until then,

s s
~ ~ ~

Update, see:

If you want to see more pictures of my gardens today, there are some on instagram and twitter.

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Bed in Summer

This post is part of a series about building a house that looks and feels traditional in New Hampshire. However, this post can be read by itself.

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — Making choices

7. Light ← You are here

8. The Kitchen

9. …

Designing for Light

Before we go over how to we think about lighting, a short primer on artificial light is warranted, because the options are numerous and the quality varies immensely.

Color Temperature

All light sources can be described in part by their color temperature, which is given in a Kelvin scale from roughly 1,000 to 12,000.

For natural light sources, these numbers really do describe how hot things are. Candles burn at ~1700 degrees Kelvin (~2600° F or ~1400° C), the sun really is a big white hot object at 5772 K.

Despite this, lower numbers are described as “warmer” and higher numbers as “cooler”. In practice you might see differences like this:

Different color temperatures have distinct advantages. Warmer color temperatures are more cozy, but too warm and a place might feel dingey. Cooler color temperatures can show colors better (matching daylight), which can be essential in studios, showrooms, and industry, but too cool and it can make a home feel antiseptic.

There’s a bunch of research about color temperature and mood that is outside the scope of this post, and I encourage you to read about that if you’re interested. I will simply mention that it is broadly thought that warmer color temps at night can improve sleep, and improve night vision — cooler colors blind you more especially if you happen to look into the light source. By contrast, cooler temps and brighter lights during the day (if you need artificial light during the day) can improve mood.

CRI

The color rendering index (CRI) is a 0-100 scale of a light source’s color representation accuracy. Higher is better. Industry and stores were concerned with CRI long before consumers, for example, supermarkets in the 1970’s wanted to be sure their produce looked as good as possible. But since the rise of incandescent alternatives—many of them with poor color quality—consumers have also taken an interest in CRI, and many manufacturers now give a CRI number on the box.

CRI is about 15% fake. The test itself only covers a small set of color samples, so manufacturers can game the number while still emitting a poor spectrum, and on top of this I suspect that some manufacturers simply lie. A single number can also be unhelpful in telling what’s wrong with a bulb (two bulbs with the same score can saturate different colors poorly). Despite this, a CRI 95 bulb will probably look better than a CRI 80 one. But there is no substitute for buying and trying the bulbs.

On occasion you will find a lower CRI bulb that looks great anyway. This is not too surprising — the metric was originally an attempt at being objective about color, but it can fail to test what humans find perceptually pleasing. An intense example are sodium vapor bulbs, which gave many cities their yellow and orange glow for decades, though they are being phased out now. Their light really is yellow in addition to being warm, and they have a CRI of about 25.

Indoors, in general, the brightest bulbs you select should probably have a high CRI. But supplementary dimmer bulbs, such as reading lights, can be perfectly good (or even pleasing) with lower CRI.

Lumens and Watts

Lumens are a measure of light intensity. Watts are a measure of the power draw. A 60-watt incandescent and a 6-watt LED bulb can both give off 750 lumens, with the difference as wasted heat. For a long time consumers were only familiar with wattage, so manufacturers might call the 6-watt LED bulb a “60-watt equivalent” instead of stating its lumen value in the title (it might be elsewhere on the box, and printed on the bulb itself).

Types of Bulbs

Incandescent - If you put a tiny piece of tungsten wire in a glass ball and run electricity through the wire, it will get so hot that it produces light. You are actually heating it to the literal color temperature of 2700K (4400° F or 2427° C). They are hot! Most of the electricity is therefore wasted as heat. Also they are beautiful. This is in effect a miniature dimmed sun, so the CRI is 100. Almost always 2700K. Perfectly dimmable.

Halogen - If you put a tiny amount of a halogen gas inside an incandescent you get a more efficient bulb that can operate at higher temperatures, and in compact spaces. CRI 100. 3000-3500K. Perfectly dimmable.

Both Incandescent and Halogen bulbs become warmer (lower color temperature) as they are dimmed, down to about 2200K.

CFL - Compact fluorescents have a poor CRI (often 70-80) and contain mercury gas and aren’t really used now that we have better LED options. Poorly dimmable with slow start up times. I know of no reason to buy one today.

LED - A basket of technologies for putting power through a semiconductor and getting back light. Extremely efficient and small, with little waste heat, and long life (in theory at least, there are many bad manufacturers). Quality is all over the map. Cheap ones should be avoided. The best inexpensive brands are probably Philips and Feit. CRI usually 80-95, can be found in any color temp, even very warm. Dimming is often poor, and the worst offenders will flicker and buzz when dimmed.

Natural Light Considerations

Part of house orientation is letting in light where it matters. In our case, there were several things to balance with the floorplan:

• The house front door should face the road, to look stately

• The kitchen windows and any French doors should face the yard, to give the best views

• There should be easy access from the kitchen to a patio for dining, and dooryard garden for herbs, etc, and these are ideally on the southern side. (Part 3 covered more about kitchen garden placement.)

• Rooms we spend the most time in should be on the southern side, to maximize light.

• Windows are always two-way portals: They should not only let in light but one should be able to look out them and see pleasant scenes. This means that cars and driveway should be on the darker north side, along with the less-frequently used rooms.

The basic idea of the floor plan, with our budget only allowing a single 30x38 mass, therefore looks like this:

There would be more interesting decision-making here if we had more than just one mass to work with. Larger houses need to maximize light, but the very good ones also make great use of darker spaces, for things like reading nooks and other small rooms or passages. A result of our budget is that we could not afford the luxury of shadows, privacy, and passages that are enabled by well-executed complex massing.

So with a simple footprint, most of the decisions here are pretty clear and centered around light maximization. You don’t want a bathroom/laundry on the valuable southern wall. You do want the dining room adjacent to the kitchen. And you want the most light in the parts of the house that you are going to use frequently.

One major decision which I’ve mentioned before: There was originally a planned wall between living room and dining room, to give more enclosure to the spaces, making them feel more private and cozy. We’re not very fond of open floor plans. But we removed that wall from the plan to allow a more central wood stove that could heat the whole house. This is, in some sense, another compromise from having only a single mass.

Outside, the result looks like this:

The kitchen could have been on the south wall instead of the west. But the ideal pattern, to me, is that the kitchen receives ample natural light but the softest version of that light possible, for as long as possible. Being open to the southern side, but farther from it, feels ideal. A typical day might produce this light in the afternoon:

It is difficult to reproduce the feel and colors of the sunlit kitchen from photos, since it changes so much throughout the day, and since my phone camera in particular constantly mistakes the color balance indoors. Later in the evening, the kitchen light might look like:

The softer-light allows one to store some light-sensitive ingredients (like a bottle of wine) against the western wall for a day without too much worry. Nonetheless we keep our olive oil in a metal vessel to protect it.

In the evening on a very cloudy day, it might look like this:

The western light affords use of the kitchen as long as possible without electricity. We find this extremely pleasant. We love not only light, but shades and shadows too, and the varied contrast of the hours. So we tend to delay turning on electric lights until they’re really needed.

Natural Light in Bedrooms

Upstairs, there are two bedrooms on the northeast and northwest corners, and the master bedroom (with its bath) takes the whole south. The master bedroom is very bright, with a matching largeness that makes it feel right. This does not make the master bedroom strictly better, however.

All three bedrooms were designed with windows on two walls, and no bedroom has fewer than three windows. The other two bedrooms, especially the western one, have a superior softness to their light quality. This is difficult to show with pictures, it’s something that has to be more lived in.

The same soft light is true of the studio room downstairs. Though I don’t use it to paint, I should mention that in general artists prefer northern-lit rooms for studios, because the lack of harsh rays and relatively unchanging nature of northern light make for more consistent working conditions.

Artificial Light Considerations

The halogen and incandescent bulbs in this house are always at least a little bit dimmed. If there is a single thing you should remember from this section: when you are using halogen or incandescent bulbs, you should dim them, if only a little. This reduces their power draw, but it also greatly increases their life. And naturally it lowers their color temperature.

The kitchen is illuminated by two sets of lights. Halogen recessed lights (“cans”) on the ceiling, which house Philips 3100K 50w bulbs. These halogen cans are the same everywhere on the first floor, and are only on the first floor. I’m not crazy about them, stylistically, but when combined with other light sources they can be pretty useful.

They two sets remain dimmed (between 20% and 80%) in normal use. We would only put them to full power when doing very specific work that needs as much light as possible, or when cleaning at night.

Various dimming, with the pendant lights on or off:

Note how halogen ceiling cans are also directional. They have to point at something, and generally they should point at the walls instead of straight down. In the living room they point between windows, where art might be placed. You can get halogen bulbs with wider or narrower “flood”.

The pendant lights are LED, each has a Philips 700 lumen, 9.5w 2200-2700 K dimmable bulb. These are ugly bulbs, but they are completely hidden, and additionally softened, by the milk-glass of the pendants. The dimming function works well for an LED.

Note the height of my pendants. This next image, in my opinion, is something you want to avoid:

It is irksome to work alongside someone or even just sit at a kitchen bar with a light so close to your face.

Other Rooms

In the living room and dining room we also have halogen cans, but most of the time they are fairly dimmed. The dining room gets additional light from a chandelier of 7.5 watt incandescents. Again: almost never full power, but dimmed! So the total power draw is quite low. LEDs look especially poor in many candelabra settings because the bulbs themselves can be very ugly, and their light very directional. In chandeliers you really want the effect of a glow less than trying to illuminate every corner of the room, so under-powered incandescent bulbs are still the most beautiful choice, here, despite their inefficiency.

As a supplement the living room has a small table lamp (with a 15w incandescent) for working, and a floor lamp for the couch, from IKEA. In general, do not use IKEA LED bulbs. They are almost all universally poor. There’s one exception, their very dim LED bulbs like this one are peculiar enough to be good. The CRI is poor, they’re quite dim and quite yellow, but it’s kind of a beautiful light and the bulbs do not look that bad. They are also safe for children to handle since the bulb is plastic, not glass. They make a decent night light in a child’s room, or in an attic space.

In that floor lamp instead we have an LED Feit “vintage Edison” style 200 lumen, 2100 K bulb. The CRI of this bulb is also somewhat poor, at 80, so it’s fairly yellow. But it makes for a beautiful reading light and does not seem to conflict badly with the light that the halogens give. You have to be careful mixing bulbs generally, sometimes it can make a room look awkward. There are no rules here, though, there’s simply no substitution for trying different bulbs.

Upstairs Lighting

Do you really need bulbs upstairs, dear reader? Do you need electricity at all? Why not simply take a candle? You do? Fine. All right.

I’m of the opinion that lighting upstairs should be dimmer than the first floor. It should have a completely different mood. On the first floor it’s nothing to flick a switch that might kill a cave of bats, illuminating every corner. Sometimes you need to. Upstairs the same setup feels harsh and garish and I think people commit enormous error by treating these floors the same.

I especially do not like overhead lights on the second floor, even more so if the ceiling height is lower (in our house the first floor is 9 feet, the second floor 8.5 feet, to make it slightly more cozy, and less cavernous feeling). Of course if you work or do other projects upstairs you may also need very bright lights for that, but in general you should consider if you can get away with something considerably softer.

Our upstairs is illuminated solely by 5-watt and 7.5-watt incandescents, almost all on dimmers. The glow (and look) is still unmatched by LED bulbs, and we use so little electricity comparatively that the bulb efficiency is of no real importance.

There’s an exception for the bathroom, where you might need to see with perfect clarity. A very warm setup for the bathroom can cause one to misjudge colors. At the same time some kind of night-light is paramount in a bathroom, so it can be nice to have both very bright and very dim options.

With no overhead lights, we make great use of sconces (all three here are raw brass from Northeast Lantern, a New Hampshire company), and a few table-top lights. The bathrooms have lights above the mirror, and a counter-top 5-watt as a night light.

The bottom-right table-top light is from IKEA, (taernaby). It is one of the best dimmable table-top lights for the price. You should immediately discard the awful LED it comes with and buy a 5-watt incandescent.

I do not expect you to agree wholesale with our philosophy on lighting, but I do encourage you to buy some 5, 7.5, and 15 watt incandescent bulbs and try them out, and see if you like them. Ultimately there’s no substitute for buying and trying bulbs yourselves, and while this can be frustrating with LEDs (many of the excellent ones are very expensive), incandescent bulbs are extremely cheap.

You can actually make your own fixtures

Most light fixtures in our house (and all the exterior ones) are from Northeast Lantern, which makes beautiful brass fixtures, though they are not cheap. In a few rooms we have vintage lights from eBay, with modern bulbs, and in the kitchen the four pendant lights are from Etsy. These last lights were actually assembled out of brass parts, which are freely available to buy from the appropriately named Grand Brass Lamp Part company, should you wish to make your own light fixtures. We did this with one light, though we have since replaced it with one from Northeast Lantern.

Shadows

It is very possible for a house to have too much light, especially a large house. Some people really do go overboard with natural light, for instance with a peculiar nouveau lodge aesthetic. (Though in their particular defense, such walls of windows were likely originally intended for nighttime viewing, not daytime light.)

There is a certain attraction to dim spaces, alcoves, nooks, and so on. Every big house should feel like it has its secrets, and this includes secret spaces. If there is a virtue in size, it is not in the bigness itself but in the ability for separation, including separating oneself from the light, and others. The Victorian-era concept of a drawing room after all is short for withdrawing.

But such a topic is too big this post — it will have to wait for another time.

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware ← You are here

7. Light

8. The Kitchen

9. …

Materials and Hardware

After your floorplan, and along with your use of sunlight, the materials you choose will make the biggest difference in the mood that inhabits your home. New houses are made of drywall, carpet, polyurethane (plastic) coated wood floors or now entirely synthetic “wood” floors, foam doors, chrome and plastic hardware, and typically large, inexpensive tile that often looks the same house-to-house. Old homes tend to have a lot more plaster, oiled wood, smaller tile, heavy solid wood doors, and very varied hardware, tile, wallpaper, colors(!), more brass and iron, rugs instead of carpet, and no plastic. I am not suggesting you build your own home in any particular way, but it may be useful to think about these things. This post covers our own thinking and what we decided.

Before you start, keep your end goal in mind

This is not too obvious to say: your house should be built out of the things that you’d like to see in your house. The walls and surfaces and the things on them should feel like they go together. The things you use every day should feel like they belong. What makes some houses look very appealing and others uncanny is the level of coherence and honesty in the surroundings.

It is difficult to create a house that feels in some sense truly beautiful if the house itself is made out of cheap or unfitting materials. So as I mentioned in the second post, our goal is a few good details in the right places.

What’s the matter with modern choices?

Aside from the obvious cost motivation, there seems to be an aesthetic undercurrent in new home construction. I think it is wrapped up in the design trend towards “cleaner” spaces. This trend spans centuries, though in America it is most obvious between the transition from Victorian and Eastlake houses to the modern houses we live in. Consider, for example, some popular doorknobs today:

I hate these knobs. You can feel it when you turn them, they exude carelessness. They are “clean”, they make no aesthetic promises that you have to keep with your own decor or the rest of the house. But they aren’t born out of a respect for minimalism, they are just part of the rabid economizing on all house parts that do not directly contribute to square footage. In a $500,000 house, the builder spends maybe $200–500 total on doorknobs, including entry knobs. I think this is a mistake, and maybe the first signal that no care has gone into the design.

For our knobs, we bought old hardware at architectural salvage stores, eBay, and yard sales. Some were in poor condition and needed some fixup, but that’s (hopefully) some one-time work. Many of our knobs are in the Eastlake or similar style:

One important thing to note, if you go this route and buy old hardware, is that you must order doors that are not pre-drilled. The bore hole of modern doorknobs is much larger than the small vintage rosettes and plates that are screwed to the door to hold the knob and spindle. If you don’t buy pre-drilled doors, you will also have to have a carpenter bore your doors for the spindles and latching mechanisms, which will increase your cost.

More simply, you can just buy nicer knobs that fit modern doors. Many brands sell them, such as Emtek (sold on lots of sites including large ones like build.com), House of Antique Hardware (which re-sells a lot of brands, including Emtek), and many other places online. Nice sets can be fancy, like the Eastlake style, or fluted glass, but they can also be simple brass, iron, or porcelain knobs that were common one hundred years ago. Buying attractive modern-door knobs cost about $50–200 per set. You are free to mix these and cheaper knobs, and for many of them you can put a nice knob on one side (like the doorknob for entering the basement, that guests would see) and a less expensive knob on the other (the doorknob you see if you’re in the basement), and by splitting up the “nice” pair, use it in two places. Note that it may not be possible to mix and match all modern brands like this, but with antique hardware it’s often easy.

How much you spend on something like knobs is up to you, but my feeling is that the hardware you physically interact with, the things you are actually touch every day as you go about using your house, are worth the extra cost. They should be heavy and feel like solid, purposeful objects, and not a hollow piece of brass connected to a hollow door.

Speaking of doors: Try not to buy the cheapest ones! You don’t have to get solid wood doors to have them feel considerably better (heavier), you can get MDF doors inexpensively that are fairly heavy and feel OK. When looking at options, pay attention to the weight of the product. See them in person if possible.

What’s really going on here, with beautiful door knobs?

The doors of different ages tell a story, but it is a very common story, not at all about door hardware. Door handles were once simple pieces of wood or iron, shaped into bars or balls. As time went on hardware became more ornate, and there are many pretty examples of latches and knobs not just in museums but also on medieval shops and churches that still exist today. With the industrial revolution it became even easier to create more beautiful and complex designs, like the Eastlake ones and other styles.

But some time in the age of mechanization we seem to have stopped caring. The average knob with a lock has a fair amount of internal complexity, but the beauty has been completely stripped out. We no longer think of knobs, hinges, latches, or locks as things worth making beautiful, and we think this at a time when it should be easier and cheaper than ever to make such things beautiful. When they were difficult to make, iron latches and handles resembled hands, lions, flowers, gargoyles, etc. Now that a latch is easy to make, they look like nothing. This is worth pondering, I think, beyond the words of this post and well beyond door knobs.

With all the advantages of technology, we rarely build beautiful everyday structures or everyday objects. All the progress in mechanization and materials seems to be little match for the colossal bad taste that permeates environments. This seems to me a kind of primal mistake. Where the divine may exist in history, we read of gods walking in gardens, temples, groves, and other beautiful places that we have built and sought out for thousands of years. If we have in some part stopped trying to build beautiful places and objects, why have we done so? What forces have left the world? What work can we do towards recapturing these things? These questions deserve our attention, especially if you are trying to build something beautiful yourself.

More about modern cleanliness

The obvious problem with some modern material choices is that if they are chosen for a clean look, they often don’t stay that way. New home materials tend to get worse over time: A soiled solid light-gray carpet looks worse than a faded vintage Persian rug, a chipped polyurethane floor looks worse than old, worn wood. Fake materials disintegrate, while natural materials gain patina and grow in elegance.

Old houses harbor much of their charms in the materials themselves, which seem to get better over time, because the wear that the materials take on makes them more beautiful. Raw brass and copper grow a patina. Marble gets scratched or etched. Oiled wood floors get re-oiled, darken with age and get dented. The finishes on these objects are alive. They do not decline so much as they move with time. Even raw plaster, as it is painted and broken and repaired over time, becomes more and more pretty. A dramatic example:

Of course, something like this is not an easy look to pull off in new construction! We certainly didn’t try. But for old remodels along these lines there are several attractive ideas to consider. I have written about this a bit more in Patina and Intimacy.

With new construction, unless its very well done, distressing and artificial aging can look dishonest. So I cannot recommend you prematurely age anything, but you should consider how age acts upon your materials and choices. Marble countertops are rare in the US because people don’t want the maintenance or risk of etching, raw brass is rare because people prefer a solid (a “clean!”) color to a patina. When choosing countertops and hardware, we opted for mostly marble and brass because we love the character they bring with them through the years.

Honest and Dishonest Materials

I mentioned in an earlier part that the level of honesty you put into your design is important. If you wish to build a cottage it should be simple in cottage ways and complex in cottage ways. It should aim to be cozy and not pretend to be a palace. If you build a palace it should not look folksy, or have disorganized landscaping, or plastic towel rings and cheap shower curtains. You should think hard about what feels appropriate, and if you are trying to save money, the compromises you make should be different for different designs.

The materials you use should match what you are working with, and where you hope to build. There is nothing wrong with inexpensive materials themselves, and sometimes the cheaper option is the more suitable one. Have a look at this New Hampshire cabin kitchen, for example:

Much of good design is refusing to do what’s bad. Avoiding kitsch or out-of-proportion decor is important. A cabin is a place of simplicity. Wood ceilings and exposed beams can feel honest in a cabin, while high-tech appliances like modern stainless steel with blue-LED displays would feel dishonest. So too would granite countertops in an otherwise rustic setting. What Forestbound has built for cabinetry are simply 2x4 studs, pine boards, and a few wood crates, all painted white. This is inexpensive, and keeps the feel of the space genuine. An identical setup of cabinets and counters in a stately colonial would feel out of place, though they may feel honest if you were building a farmhouse of the same size.

In 2016, we lived in the attic of an old house, which had interesting skylights, an unusual floor plan and a 3rd story porch, but it was renovated long ago with now-disgusting carpet. Simplicity and I ripped up the carpet to reveal a plywood sub-floor. We couldn’t afford anything fancy (and it wasn’t our house), so we felt the most honest way to renovate it would be to simply paint the plywood white, and let it be what it is, a simple, un-fussy attic apartment.

For great examples of honest and dishonest design, read the books by Marianne Cusato (Get Your House Right) and Leon Krier (Drawing for Architecture) that I mentioned earlier in the Research post.

Examples of honest and dishonest materials and renovations are a little harder to come by, though they are always interesting to talk about, but I don’t want to get carried away.

Tile and Countertops

Tile is commonly used in new home construction in mud rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms. It is almost always either large faux-wood plank style or square tiles (large = faster and cheaper to install and grout) that look like this:

Do these 49 cent per square foot tiles look familiar? Like gray carpet, they are everywhere. Tile quality in new construction rarely goes above $2/square foot. Note the similarities in fixtures, tiles, colors, and carpet of these three half-million dollar homes:

These new homes illustrate some of the problem with modern cleanliness. It’s not just “clean” but a kind of sameness-filled sterility that the builders are getting away with. None of the rooms are inspired. None of the builders are trying their best. You can’t even tell the pictures are from three different houses.

I don’t want to convince you against designing with a clean or minimalist aesthetic if that’s your desire. A spare austerity can be dramatic and beautiful. But you should be wary of the identity-less sterility that permeates modern home construction. These houses are the opposite of having an aesthetic preference, they are trying to have no opinion at all, not even venturing to have a shade of color beyond beige. They contain the opposite of creativity, a kind of generic muteness. In a profession where your role is to create things, it is cowardly.

For tile: I cannot tell you what to design, it’s only easy to tell you what to avoid. But you should look at a lot of images to get an idea of what else is possible, and at what price. Manufacturer sites like Clé Tile can offer a lot of inspiration. (We used them, and we also used much cheaper tile from places like Wayfair too. The difference in quality is noticeable, though.) You should also use Pinterest to get a feel for what’s possible in terms of making even bathrooms into very charming places.

Pinterest comes with its own tendencies toward sameness but it’s a much better start than only looking at the homes that might be available for you to visit.

The essential thing is that you should try to make your spaces matter. Every room in your home is meaningful, and the smaller the space the more you should be comfortable being bold. Even odd opinions are often better than the endless uniformity you find in new homes.

Countertops

I have only two short notes on countertops: First, marble is not popular in the US because any materials that require maintenance are not popular. Like some of the stone options it needs to be sealed (and eventually, re-sealed), and is more susceptible to damage than granite, quartz, or composites. Still, we love it, so we went with mostly marble for ours.

Second, for smaller spaces, you can often save some money by going to countertop fabricators and choosing from their remnants, the unused slabs from their prior jobs, instead of ordering new slabs. Note that this is only possible once you know the sizes for all your countertops, and it also puts you at the mercy of what they have in stock. We used remnants for our three bathrooms, but not the kitchen.

Walls

In older homes, the walls were typically made of horizontal strips of wood called lath that were covered in plaster, which seeps through the gaps enough to hold itself firmly in place. Drywall, sold in 4-foot by 8-foot panels, replaced this because it is much faster and cheaper to install. Drywall has downsides: Being fairly soft, it scrapes and dents more easily, and if the gaps between boards aren’t taped well it can show, and the sound dampening qualities are somewhat worse.

We are quite fond of plaster, so we opted for veneer plaster walls. This setup uses 4 by 8 foot gypsum boards instead of wood lathe, and then involves skimming a few thin coats of plaster on top of it. This is less labor intensive than the old way of doing things while retaining most of the benefit and all of the look. Pricing for this kind of wall apparently varies greatly depending on your location, but its generally slightly more expensive than drywall. Depending on how you finish plaster walls, you can add pigment directly to the plaster or texture the surface, or simply paint it.

Raw, unpainted and un-pigmented plaster has a slightly mottled appearance, with a cream-white to white-rose color, which changes in different light. We like it so much that we’ve kept most of the walls in our house unpainted plaster.

With wall finishes, you have a lot of options. You could argue that builders painting every single room the same contractor off-white color allows the the buyer to paint the rooms the colors they want, or wallpaper as they want, but it seems like most houses rarely change from the builder defaults. I think you should really explore Pinterest and whatever local historical homes you can find to get some ideas of what’s possible beyond Modernist Minimalist Gray. Eventually we’ll paint or wallpaper some of the surfaces, because the same walls everywhere is a little too much uniformity, but we’re in no rush.

Our Choices

We wanted to avoid chrome as much as possible, so most of our faucets and lights are brass, either polished and coated (common for faucets) or raw (common on lights). These have an aesthetic gravity to them that chrome does not. I’m not exactly sure why they fell out of fashion, but I assume it has to do with the trend towards cleanliness, in that it’s another opinion that people have decided to not have. Working with these other materials is harder: You have to risk them looking gaudy, or silly, or simply out of place, and going the clean chrome route is somewhat a way to dodge this. Some of our fixtures:

To economize on some bathroom fixtures, a few are chrome, and I regret this! They should all be brass. I have since replaced one of them (with a Rohl raw brass faucet that’s quite pretty), and will replace the others in time.

We sourced light fixtures from a number of places, including Ebay and Etsy. For reproduction historical lights, like the ones on the outside of our house, we bought from a small New Hampshire company called Northeast Lantern, which specializes in historical reproduction lights made with raw brass and raw copper.

It turns out you can build your own lights pretty easily, and this is what most of the sellers on Etsy are doing. There are sites like Grand Brass Lamp Parts which offer almost everything you need to make a million different kinds of fixtures. Simi found a shade she really liked for the dining room table lamp, so we made our own fixture out of a brass ceiling base and cord from Grand Brass. Though we eventually replaced this with a more historic chandelier two years later.

Old houses often had grand and sometimes unique newel posts at the bottom of the stairs. It was actually our builder’s recommendation that we look through architectural salvage stores to find one we like to install, because it would reduce the “sameness” feel of the house hardware. We took his advice, and found an old lavender post that appeared to be walnut underneath the paint (and regrettably gunky brown paint-like stuff under the lavender and white paint). I have no idea why people painted over the magnificent wood, but they did. We cleaned it up and oiled it:

Flooring

I like wood. I like hardwood floors like oak because they are beautiful, accept a lot of stain, and change color with age. I like pine because it dents easily and builds its own character. I like the feel of wood, even the creaks and gaps in old houses. I really don’t like polyurethane floors because the coating takes away from the feel of the material.

I don’t expect everyone to share this opinion. The reason polyurethane floors are so popular is because they are very simple to clean and maintain (provided you don’t damage the coating itself). Prolonged spills cannot water-log them, they cannot be stained by messes, and they can be wiped clean. Older wood floors take maintenance: They need to be re-oiled or waxed periodically to keep their luster and stop dirt and water from harming them. Wood floors without polyurethane coatings wear. They occasionally get warped by moisture. To us, these downsides of older floors add up to the living finish that makes them enchanting. Polyurethane floors feel “clean” in the sterile way that everything in new houses do. Oiled floors feel more like part of nature, the trees that compose the floor are no longer growing but they are still moving through time, gathering stains, scuffs, dark and light patches. They are capable of feeling worn, and this means they are capable of feeling lived in. Sterility is good for the hospital ward, but the home should feel more cozy.

We decided to have a contractor install red oak floors, and we would finish them ourselves in several stages. Since our goal was to have floors with texture and character, we thought that our amateurishness at the task would almost be an advantage.

To start, we used a WOCA color oil product on all the floors. Except for the bathrooms with tile, the whole house has wood floors, so this was most of the square footage.

This looked good, but it dried a little too matte for us. We decided we would lightly sand the floors and oil them again, this time experimenting with Tried and True wood finishes. The benefit of these products is that they are 100% solvent free, have zero VOC’s, and contain no heavy metal drying agents. This allowed us to re-oil each room of the house while we were living in it, without worrying about air quality.

The downside of the these products is that, in containing none of the toxic components found in most floor finishes, they take considerably longer to dry. When using the pine resin finish, which is perhaps the most beautiful one made by Tried and True, it took almost a month to completely cure. So by doing the floors this way we found out why no one does anymore: No one wants to wait! People decided that if noxious vapors are the price of faster construction, so be it.

~ ~ ~

If I can summarize this long post simply: The objects in your house should have an anchoring gravity to them. They should look and feel solid whenever possible. This doesn’t mean they have to be old or look old. They just need to have the weight of real things. Solid wood and metal have weight. Age has its own gravity. There are other ways to give this feeling, if you ponder it for a while.

Hopefully that’s plenty to think about, for now.

s s

This newsletter is called The Map Is Mostly Water, and is about a number of topics.

This house design post is part of a series inside that newsletter, called Everyday Aesthetics.

A little moth asked the other day, what makes something beautiful?

I wonder and doubt if I could ever give a fulfilling answer. As a topic it is almost too monumental to touch. Certainly to write about all at once. But maybe we can glance at it from time to time. So, a short visit.

~ ~ ~

There seems to be a common mistake of confusing beauty with novelty. I think this arose because popular artists seem to have redirected—and confined(!!)—themselves to a few flourishes of novelty at the expense of other artistic expressions.

The enchantment of such works is passing. When some painted novelty gets old we can easily pretend it never existed and move on. We scarcely have to be embarrassed. But architecture has a more lasting influence, we all have to live with the results.

Some examples of this art as novelty, from the same architect:

If we are being charitable we could call these designs enterprising, neat, original, striking, etc. Perhaps even memorable, but only insomuch as they appear very odd.

Novelty is not bad, but it’s not beauty, and it’s usually clear in the intent of some works that beauty is not really the aim. Historically for art, that seems a little odd. Someone once said that the real product of modern art is not the thing itself, but what is said about it. In that sense, the artist here has won.

(Actually, did this architect win? Do you know his name?)

Anyway, I don’t think it’s very productive to document miserable buildings or write lamentations. I only want to make a few small points. If we know what fails to produce beauty, can that tell us anything about beauty? Fumbling around in the dark, can we find a secret from its shadow?

Maybe the beautiful benefits from the opposite of novelty: a kind of fitting-in. Beautiful things sometimes feel like they might have always been there. In fact when we see something exceptionally pretty, maybe a film or a dress, we might declare it a timeless classic. Novelty fades, beauty grows with age.

~ ~ ~

Consider Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s recognizable house. This is I think one of the most flattering images taken of it:

It half fits in. It wants to fit in. But I think it fails. If you get closer, you might feel the same:

There is a kind of parasitism with its environment. A one-way fitting in. The waterfall makes the house more beautiful, but the house does not make the waterfall more beautiful. The nature is not enhanced by the house, which is a series of observation decks. It feels a little bit more like a zoo than a home. There is an attempted distance, almost antiseptic, that leaves the house as an object gawking at the scenery instead of part of it.

To make something beautiful deep in nature, your work would have to build so that it dwells within that nature. Such buildings don’t need to mimic nature—the glow of windows from a house in the woods is a beautiful yet a wholly human invention—but one would reasonably expect such homes to at least draw their materials from the source. Any number of cottages and cabins achieve this, though they are not novel. They certainly don’t have monkey bars.

There’s a similar and hopefully obvious parasitism with our first architect: He is committing a parlor trick by sticking novelties on top of more beautiful settings. If the work looks interesting, it is by shocking contrast. It takes from the environment but does not give back.

~ ~ ~

Let’s look for a positive vision of fitting-in. Consider Venice: It is actually full of very plain, sometimes even shabby buildings, but each is constructed with the others in mind. Each building tries to fit in, and in doing so every building adorns every other building.

The rows sing a harmony, and even if no particular building is very special, the result is quite beautiful. If someone attempted a novelty here, which is often what architects try to do now, it would damage the scene. The same is true for many streetscapes.

I am not suggesting that you cannot make something both beautiful and novel! Just that many artists now tend to aim solely at the novel, and this exclusion (laziness? lack of inspiration? pessimism?) tends to create art that is not particularly beautiful.

Any place can still accept unique buildings. The Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute on the grand canal is unlike any other sight in Venice yet it plays its part quite well. It was once novel, but it clearly did not rest on novelty. Its aim was to glorify and celebrate things beyond itself, and we know it succeeded.

~ ~ ~

What makes something beautiful?

Fitting-in is probably too absolute to be part of the answer.

But I think it helps illustrate how beauty must involve a lot of sensitivity to context, which is partly why its so difficult to give a concise answer to the question. What is beautiful in one context may be grotesque in another. Fitting-in is just one shade of sensitivity to context. Perhaps this sensitivity is what we really should be focusing on.

~ ~ ~

Remoteness

When the little moth asked this question, I thought along these lines because I was already thinking about how fame and acclaim often seem to hinder art. Or at least the artist. To my (admittedly cloudy) eyes, artistry seems to improve when there are fewer, or temporally longer, feedback loops. I suspect so many are caught up in the connectivity of their audience that they begin to miss out on some level of self-examination. I hope you understand that this thought need not be limited to artists!

This topic and some related ones are what I have actually been trying to write about, though I don’t seem to have the words yet. Some amount of culture and genius are not born out of cities and crowds, I believe, but instead the remotest places. Perhaps almost all of it. We often only notice it once it gets to the city.

There is an old tale, one told by Leonardo da Vinci. This time instead of myself I will let his own words relate it:

A stone of a good size, recently uncovered by rainwater, lay in an elevated spot above a stony road. Surrounded by herbs that were adorned by various flowers of different colors, the stone viewed the great number of stones lying in the road below it. It conceived a desire to roll down, and said to itself: “What am I doing here among these herbs? I want to live in the company of my fellow stones.”

So letting itself roll down, it finished its tumbling course among the companions it desired. But after a while it began to suffer distress under the wagon wheels, the hoofs of iron-shod horses, and the feet of travelers. Some of them turned it, and others trampled it. At times it raised itself up a little, all covered with mud or animal dung, and in vain looked back at the place it had left behind, a place of solitary and tranquil peace. This happens to those who leave the solitary and contemplative life and choose to live in cities among people full of countless evils.

We meet again later, in another part of the forest,

s s

~ ~ ~

The top sketch is a crop of Dancing Satyrs and Nymphs, paper and chalk, Andrea Sacchi, 1609 - 1661

The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason.

— GK Chesterton

Dear friends,

In May I announced I was going to timber frame a 12x16 barn, though I did not know how to timber frame, or have much in the way of carpentry experience at all. I owned a circular saw, but before now had mostly used it for brush removal (it performs well at this). I called it the Goose Palace, because it was to be a magnificent home for birds. It is now almost complete.

If follow me on Twitter or Instagram I am sure you have seen dozens of pictures. If not, here are just a few.

An aside, though I think of this often: It is interesting to me to have my son turn 2-years old as I build this. I don’t know how much he will remember, but he must assume that it is the most normal thing in the world, to break from work for a couple months and then use all your spare time to build something. Isn’t that how everything is built? For him it’s true. Nothing could be more typical than this.

~ ~ ~

Despite having designed my house, this small barn is the first building that feels thought out from start to finish. Since I wasn’t offloading any of the work to a contractor, even splitting the foundation stones, I necessarily concerned myself with every detail. (That’s not to say I didn’t have help. I mentioned in Start with Creation that working in my driveway lead to coming across a mentor of sorts.) Though it is a very simple building, this level of attention required, that I am responsible for every saw cut and shingle and nail—and every mistake—makes it more beautiful in my eyes, because it is considered more carefully. It is endearing to me even for its flaws. Like my two year old child, I grow with it, have a relationship with it.

The goose palace will be more beautiful still, once there are a few climbing roses to stand out against its austere black. And I have purchased a single old granite step to place in front, when it’s finished. Hopefully the effect of these final touches is quite good, and provides it a fitting elegance.

The siding is pine that I carbonized, a process sometimes called shou sugi ban after the Japanese term for it. Adding a carbon layer colors it—and it pairs perfectly with Benjamin Moore historic black, which is what I’ve used for the windows and window trim—but also makes it more water, rot, and insect resistant. I made a video of the process and posted it on Youtube.

What About the Geese?

They died. They died to a 5k! Runners and walkers streamed past my house one day, and they walked off with them. Lots of people took photos, thinking it funny and strange that some young wild geese (they were too young to look like Toulouse geese yet) joined the race. Hours later, when the race ended and they were mulling about a checkpoint almost a mile away, no one knew where to take them. There was a severe drought in New Hampshire, so it was unlikely they survived even a night in the wilderness.

So the Goose Palace will have no geese, this year. My chickens, about 25, will be moved in soon. They currently reside in a tiny coop and a flophouse.

~ ~ ~

The final cost, including all timbers, siding, floors, roofing, and nails, comes to $5,036.72 (though I am probably forgetting a few nails, and this includes no tools, and I need a few door components). All wood used was pine from the local sawmill, except the cedar shingle roof. I used no plywood or OSB or glue products at all, only timbers, wood pegs, nails, and a few screws. Substack subscriptions covered the price of this project, so if you are a paying subscriber I thank you for your contribution to this art, or the next one.

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements ← You are here

6. Materials and Hardware — What we built with

7. Light

8. The Studio

9. The Kitchen

10. …

The Elements: Heating and Cooling and Airflow

Ensuring your house works well with the natural world is one of the most crucial parts of designing a home. Like I wrote in the first part, it’s also one of the most ignored. We wanted to build a house that would stay as naturally cool in the summer as possible. If we were successful, we wouldn’t need air conditioning. We also hoped to take advantage of modern insulation to mostly heat the house with a medium size wood stove, and avoid any forced-air duct work.

Ceiling Height

Heat rises. Tall ceilings have two thermal effects: In the summer they keep the house naturally cooler, but they also make winter heating bills larger because you have more interior volume to heat. If you have air conditioning, tall ceilings lose the first benefit, since total air volume makes the AC cooling more costly. Insulation used to be poor, and heating expensive, so many of the oldest small houses in New England (and other cold climates) have low ceilings. Lots of old southern architecture has taller ceilings, by contrast.

While some New England homes would have ceilings no taller than a door, more opulent homes (often heated by wood or coal-fired furnaces in the basement) might have taller (9–12 foot) ceilings. Among historic homes in New Hampshire you can find many examples of both. As far as houses built in the last 100 years, the most common ceiling height is about 8 feet.

We’d rather have cooler summer temperatures and more light, and we dislike the cramped feel of lower ceilings, so we decided on 9 feet for the first floor, and 8½ feet upstairs. Modern insulation works very well—better than I imagined actually, I spent most of my life in an 1840’s house—so heating the space has not been a problem. We collected examples of older houses in our footprint (30x38 feet, colonial style) with 9-foot ceilings to ensure we weren’t doing anything that would look uncanny. In general, the smaller the room, the more a tall ceiling begins to make the space feel oddly cavernous, so the slightly shorter ceilings upstairs help with a more cozy aspect ratio for the bedrooms.

There’s a lot more to ceiling height, and to what height feels “right”, but its somewhat climate and space specific. Both Get Your House Right and A Pattern Language offer more useful advice there. As I said before I encourage you to find out why, whenever possible, people in your area built traditional homes the way they did.

Cooling (Airflow)

We weren’t planning on having central air conditioning, so we investigated a few passive options for cooling:

• A porch to block the summer sun (Not in the budget! But this is worth investigating for your own project, and we may build one some day.)

• Trees with foliage to block sun (Some day, but not with our new construction.)

• Taller ceilings (check)

• Paint the house white (check)

• Airflow, discussed here:

You should seriously consider if you want central air or not, and how much you want. It’s taken as a default in new construction because duct-work everywhere is taken as a default. I think people today overdo it, especially in temperate climates like New Hampshire, where cooling just a few key rooms would be simpler and cheaper.

The other complication with central air can be inferred here, with these bedrooms in a home the next town over that sold (inexplicably) for 2 million. See how they’re on the ceiling?

There are no photos of the attic from this listing, and the reason is most likely because the space has become a total waste. Often in order to put in these vents, the attics will look like this:

In other words, central air can make floor plans more complicated. If you find awkward geometries and bump-outs in modern construction, it’s almost always some duct-work. And these complications can destroy otherwise-usable space, most usually the attic or final story.

Having central air via ducting changes how you use your home. There are fewer reasons to open windows, so people open fewer windows. (In newer office buildings the somewhat crazy result is that you cannot open the windows.) As people open the windows less, they air out the house less, and are perhaps at more risk of indoor CO2 buildup, and the buildup of other gasses like formaldehyde, which unfortunately outgasses from a lot of modern construction materials and furniture.

I’m skeptical of forced-air heating and cooling systems for other reasons. Careless designs can lead to poor use of space, poor performance, and difficulty keeping them clean, which can lead to mold and other respiratory issues. Most people agree that radiant heat feels better (people complaining of dry skin in the winter are often in part complaining about dry forced air heating, and don’t know it), and radiators can warm rooms more evenly than forced air ducting.

We decided on radiant forced hot water for our heating system, and several considerations for natural cooling, including incorporating as much passive airflow as possible. Ideally, we wanted wind passage north-south, east-west, and of course upwards. In our design, the downstairs is somewhat open, and the upstairs hallway affords air passage with opposite windows. We then put the attic stairs in the middle of the 2nd floor hallway, so air could continue escaping upwards.

From the outside:

The house sits on a slight hill, which may also help with airflow, as the hill compresses wind. This effect is stronger on bigger and more isolated hills, which is why windmills are often placed on ridges. I’m not certain this helps with interior airflow, but the wind from the hill definitely helps keep bugs off the back patio.

Aside: In the back of the house, note the white vent pipe and chrome base of the black chimney. I wish these were painted black or dark gray, and should have asked for them. Never assume a contractor will know what you want or make any aesthetic decisions on their own! Their job is to install stuff, your job is to think about what looks good, and then ask for it.

Air passage on the inside:

The idea is simple: Let air across, and let it upwards. The house is open enough (especially when bedroom doors are open on the 2nd floor) that wind can move quite freely through. Note also how the attic door is placed centrally on the 2nd floor, so we can keep it open for hot air to travel upwards.

Another aside: From what I knew of airflow and ancient designs, it seems obvious that the cupola in many buildings was originally meant to collect and then release rising hot air. It’s too bad that cupolas in modern houses are usually not accessible enough for the air to get to, and often have totally sealed windows or shutters. In this old 1840’s house (my childhood home), the cupola access inside was well placed to collect hot air and have it blown away. Unfortunately, we never opened its windows, so I don’t know how well it would work.

For our house, the combination of natural ventilation and tall ceilings works well on most days. Thanks to modern insulation, when the days are warm and the nights are cooler, it easily stays cool all day as long as we close the windows in the morning and open them again at night. It works so well that several visitors have thought we had AC.

There are a couple hot stretches of summer where we would have liked to have AC, but it was manageable. This setup may work even better with a whole-house fan, but we don’t have one. When our first child was born (July 2020), we did end up buying a plug-in mobile AC. We use it a few days a year now by putting it in the upstairs hallway.

If you’re on the fence I think its worth considering air conditioning only on the second floor, since it gets hotter, or better yet only in the bedrooms. Many people effectively do that here simply by getting a window AC units, but central air does have the benefit of being significantly quieter indoors. With a little more budget and foresight, and a much longer planning phase, I think we would have gone the bedroom-only route.

Heating Systems

The underlying heat for our house is radiant forced hot water. In NH it’s common to have (heating) oil for heat and propane for cooking, but we wanted to keep systems simple and use propane for both. The major downside is installing a large propane tank, and in some areas propane is more expensive, but it’s otherwise preferable to heating oil. I wish we had a steam system like in very old houses, instead of forced hot water, but designing one into our house would have increased cost and time.

Aside: In the New Hampshire countryside power outages of a few hours to a few days are not uncommon in the winter. This is partly due to being the second-most forested state, after Maine. Heavy snow or ice on weak tree branches can break a lot of power lines. The old single-pipe steam systems, which I grew up with, are a very elegant invention, and can potentially be run even when the power is out. With forced hot water, power is essential to run the pumps that circulate the water from the boiler, so you need a generator if you want to use it when the power goes out. But we were not worried about heating through power outages because our wood heating also requires no power.

We wanted as much of the house as possible to be heated by a single wood stove. As I mentioned earlier, we also didn’t want a very open design. We prefer discrete rooms, they offer more privacy, more quiet, and more opportunities to make the home feel cozy. It’s much harder to decorate big tracts of open space, and much harder to furnish those spaces into patterns like a breakfast nook, a comfy reading/sitting area, and so on.

Before the 1500’s, open floor plan houses were mostly a necessity. The entire house was heated by one fireplace, which doubled as the stove, called the hearth. As time went on, richer houses gained additional fireplaces, and rooms multiplied (and the concept of a manor’s “great hall” gave way to hallways, which were a late 1500’s invention). Today its very easy to build well-heated rooms throughout the home, unless you’re like us and still want to heat with a wood stove. Despite not being a necessity, open-concept floor-plans are somewhat popular. I think this is partly due to laziness, partly to being an easy way to make smaller spaces feel bigger, and partly because builders think that’s what people want.

In designing your own house, you should think hard about just how open you want things to be. Think about your needs, your activities, and the activities of everyone else in your (future) family. Where will the kids play? Where will you read? Eat? Are people going to watch TV? Where will you be when you are trying to concentrate on something? Are they all the same one big room? I hope you get the idea.

All of this is to say: We originally wanted a wall between the dining and living rooms, as seen below, but then we couldn’t decide on an ideal place for a wood stove. This indecision went on even after we broke ground. Eventually, we decided to axe the wall and put the wood stove in the middle, between the rooms:

Does it work?

The medium-sized wood stove we bought, a Vermont Castings Encore, is enough to nearly heat the entire house. It can easily bring the downstairs to 70° (21° C), except the study, and it heats the master bedroom too (above the living room). The two north bedrooms are colder, and also on a separate heating zone, so those require some propane-powered forced hot-water heating at night if occupied.

Downstairs, the thermostat is permanently set to 55 degrees (12.8° C). In the winter, as the night’s fire dies, the temperature will drop several degrees by morning, though it may not get to 55 unless its very cold outside.. Then each morning we get up and start a new fire (using yesterday’s embers if we were up late) to heat the house. Of course if this sounds unappealing to you but you still want a wood stove, you can always set the thermostat a lot higher than 55.

The cold start to winter mornings has become one of my favorite things about our house. It causes us to wake up and start the day much earlier. Before, I would get up with little time to spare and rush off to work. Since we moved in, we wake up early to restart the fire and make coffee. Sometimes Simi will write, or we will both read, or talk, but often we just sit together for a while and slowly wake up. When you have 1–2 hours in the morning where you can dwell calmly, drinking coffee, and not hurrying, you feel ten times better. We tend to continue this routine into the summer, waking up even earlier with the sun, and keep the coffee pot with a few candles instead of the wood stove.

Having children has changed this routine a little. It’s a good deal more variable contending with the needs of a 2-year-old and newborn, but the idea is the same. We might read to Luca instead of ourselves, or he might play with blocks while we sit together. And he always wants to be involved in the cofee-making.

~ ~ ~

Next times

Light is the other underserved natural element of home design, almost ignored in modern designs in favor of electric lighting. The topic is too big for this post, so it will get it’s own a little later. In the next post we’ll go over materials and hardware, so maybe Light will come after that.

This newsletter is called The Map Is Mostly Water, and is about a number of topics.

This house design post is part of a series inside that newsletter, called Everyday Aesthetics.

If you enjoy my writing, please consider supporting this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints ← You are here

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — What we built with

7. Light

8. The Studio

9. The Kitchen

10. …

What can we do without? What can be simplified?

Any creation with a budget has trade-offs. We wanted to build a house with a historic feel and at least some quality materials, working with the elements when possible, while keeping costs down. This makes the process something of a balancing and cutting act, and if you have a bigger budget you’ll almost certainly have a lot more liberty than we did. Deciding what we could forgo was one of the first things we decided on, before getting any estimates, since we figured we could always embellish a very basic design if estimates turned out cheaper than expected.

We began by thinking of everything we could do without, regardless of what was typical for new construction in the area.

• No garage. It’s not worth paying for a house for our cars if it frees up some budget. And the driveway would stay dirt and gravel.

• No landscaping budget. No patios or forestry budget. Not even grass seed. We’d do everything ourselves over the years, working with whatever we found along the way (such as old bricks from Facebook marketplace).

• Unfinished basement and unfinished attic. The attic is just a plywood sub-floor. With an eye to future potential, our design had 3 bedrooms but we built a 4-bedroom septic system so we could upgrade the attic area eventually. We also had the plumber run heating pipes up to the attic in case we want to add to a heating system later, since adding the pipes is much easier during construction.

• In New Hampshire it’s somewhat common to have heating oil for heat and propane for cooking, which means two separate tanks. We wanted to keep systems simple, and hoped to rely on the wood stove mostly for heat, so our (backup) heating system and cooktop/oven both use propane. Also heating oil, while being slightly cheaper, is kind of gross and has worse emissions.

• No central air. With no A/C and a propane heat system that uses forced hot water, there is no need for any duct-work in the house, making the internals a little simpler. In a smaller house such as ours, removes the problem of where to place ducts. Even in expensive homes you sometimes find weird ceiling bulges from odd duct work, and vents that potentially get obstructed by furniture:

I’ll say more on vents in the post on (heating and cooling) elements.

• One of the biggest tradeoffs: We opted for small (for a new custom home) square footage, in an uncomplicated shape. Our house is just one primary mass, a rectangle, that’s 30x38 feet, or 2,280 square feet over 2 finished floors.

• No walk-in closets. In fact, no closets! This is a cue we took from the layout of old homes, which had few or no closets, especially no walk-ins like you see in all new homes. We designed our house without closets (except one—the space under attic stairs), with the thinking that more spacious bedrooms are preferable to closing off the room space required for the closets. Then we could use wardrobes, chests, drawers, etc., to store our clothes and things. Furniture instead of closet doors means that furniture in a room is more movable (for example, without closet doors to mind, there are more walls you can put a bed against), letting us try more furniture configurations. Later, if we felt we really needed closets, we could always build them in, and once we’ve lived in the house for a while, we’d know exactly where we’d want them to go. After almost four years, we’re quite happy with just furniture, though finding nice looking (to us, usually older) furniture at a good price is a slow process.
  
  One small downside we noticed after living here a while is that no closet space on the first floor has lead to no great place to keep the vacuum cleaner downstairs (and we’re unwilling to cannibalize pantry space). But this can be fixed by building a larger mudroom on the north side of the house, instead of adding a closet. For now, it often resides in the studio/office.

• No cabinets above the kitchen counter. I think modern kitchens have too many cabinets generally, inviting clutter, and making some kitchens feel more claustrophobic than they ought to be. Instead, we opted for a large accessible pantry behind doors on the other side of the kitchen, and place the basement stairs very close by for storage of less frequent items and bulk things. This lets us keep a well-stocked kitchen without feeling too cluttered, and reduces the cabinetry bill a bit.

The result is a floor plan without any serious complexities, and the relative spareness (such as no closets) meant construction could be a little simpler and faster, saving on labor costs. A minimalist house is not at all our ideal, but is in effect a concession of budget, with the understanding that the adornment will come from furnishings instead.

When working out your own budget, you should think about all the typical features that go into a home. What could you do without? What would be easy to do later, if it came down to a budgeting issue? Can you design the building site so you can add some masses later if you want them? For example our small mud room is built so that we can add a much larger one connected to it, should we need more of that kind of storage (and a more out-of-sight place to keep messes, work clothes, cat food dishes, etc).

To save more, we decided we would do as much of the finishing work as we knew how to do. This meant we finished the wood floors ourselves (we paid for installation), did the interior painting, cleaned up the final construction, and did (are still doing) all landscaping ourselves. We also did smaller things, like installing cabinet and door hardware.

We delayed on a few things to free up more budget. We had granite steps put in the front of the house, but kept the side and rear steps as planks of unfinished deck wood. We figured we would be able to find granite for cheaper if we waited until something came along (this turned out to be true within a year, and we now have granite for all steps). Of course, this also means our dooryard has stayed a construction zone for much longer. It also means that a lot of the outdoor construction was down to us, which suited us just fine.

In the kitchen, we wanted a single open shelf above counters, and a kitchen island, but did not need them right away. The first kitchen setup had no shelves above counters, and our island was just IKEA stilts and butcher block:

After living with the setup for a while, we decided on doubling one set of shelves, and found some good brass brackets to match our faucet and knobs.

If there are features you’re on the fence about, or aren’t yet sure how to design, it can be ideal to delay if it’s not intrusive to add later. As you actually start to live in the space you can decide if its something you really need or not. And once you start using your home, you might see the design of some part in a totally different way. A simple example is the design of our kitchen island and shelves, which we took a year to think about while using the space. Even simpler: we wired the pantry with electricity for a microwave, but even after a few years we still never felt the need for one, so we could pass on that and keep the extra pantry space. Another example is in our closets as mentioned above, which we are happily doing without after almost four years, and feel no need to install any. We will probably add another mudroom someday, though, so the side entrance has more storage.

Since we knew we’d want some kind of island, we had the electrician wire for the eventual island when they were here, by running a wire in the basement so that when the island is built, we need to only drill a small hole to bring electricity up. Then we can run the KitchenAid, pasta extruder, etc, from the island’s power. Note: after 4 years we still haven’t felt the need to connect this electricity. You can see our KitchenAid on the island above, which gets used every week for bread, but we just hoist it up and put it on the countertop instead of the island to plug it in.

The downside of delaying are somewhat obvious: Any time you want to add a closet or a mud room later, you will have to call another contractor, make a new mess, and possibly get more building permits, which ultimately adds cost compared to doing it all at once. And some people may find the power of inertia holds them back from making too many changes once they live in the space. Having to move all your stuff out of a room to do some renovation in a lived-in area is its own kind of constraint.

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll go over the elements (heating, cooling, wind, and maybe light)

s s

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect ← You are here

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — What we built with

7. Light

8. The Studio

9. The Kitchen

10. …

Essential Research for Home Design

In the first post I mentioned a few problems with new homes we wanted to avoid, centered around what’s dull or lazy about modern design. But beyond avoiding what is bad, you should think about how you can capture what is good about the traditional homes of your area.

Part of this is aesthetic. A classic New England home is considered classic because so many people have built in a consistent set of patterns. A house should feel like it is from somewhere — and this is only possible if the house and the land adorn each-other. Building something traditional contributes to the landscape, and we should take this seriously. Places exert themselves on us, they twist and turn our moods. The land shapes us as we shape it.

On the practical level, you should study the vernacular architecture of your area to search for good building practices. Traditional architecture, like most tradition, is a creation born out of managing unseen and unstated trade-offs and consequences, often for generations. Sometimes important features are not obvious until they are removed, and can only be fixed with great expense, or not fixed at all.

Many old home features are a response to the environment. A simple example: large porches especially in the southern US are meant to shade windows from excessive sunlight and heat, while south-facing houses in the north are meant to capture it. A well-designed porch may let in sunlight only in the winter time, when the sun’s pitch is low, and well-placed trees may provide sun cover in the summer and sunlight in the colder months, once their leaves have fallen.

Old houses tended to face a certain way, and while they may be contending with different pressures, the layout is almost never an accident. We want to be equally careful with our own building. House orientation extends beyond the buildings themselves: You want to be sure any porches or patios are in pleasing locations, and if you intend to keep a dooryard garden or kitchen garden, you’ll want to make sure it is properly positioned. For example, here in New Hampshire it is ideal for a kitchen/dooryard garden to be close to the kitchen of course. But it should also receive ample southern sun exposure, and ideally be protected from cold north or westerly winds, which may destroy early plantings that are sensitive to frosts. It would therefore be very inappropriate to have this dooryard (which contains a garden) on the other side of this house, even though its the same distance from the kitchen:

You will find many building- and region-specific examples of architecture and details, and it’s good to know why people did certain things so that you can decide if it’s something you want to do or avoid. In addition to functional cues, you might also get an essential grasp of why certain styles and fashions developed.

I was going to include a few more vernacular architecture examples in my final edit here, but I’m near the email length limit for this post! So perhaps I’ll give more examples in a later post.

Read (that’s part of research)

If you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build something, I suggest you take this step seriously.

At a minimum you should read two books. The first is Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use & Avoid by Marianne Cusato with illustrations by Richard Sammons and Leon Krier. It is a thoughtful book, illustrating in a “Use X — Avoid Y” fashion how to reason about appropriate features and patterns. It is the best of its kind that I’ve found.

There’s a lot of detail in Get Your House Right, which can seem intimidating. Some of these details are less important, I think, than the proportions and the level of honesty that you put into your design. It is perfectly OK to build a grand house or a simple house, but a simple house should have simple features, and not exaggerated ones. When houses look bad, it is often because things are out of proportion or scale. Cusato’s book is a great introduction to thinking about this. I’ll come back to this concept of honesty later, because I think it is essential for getting things right in any budget.

It’s not an essential read, but Leon Krier also has a book of just his illustrations called Drawing for Architecture which explains intuitively the differences between—in his opinion—good and bad architectural patterns, city planning, and living for that matter. You do not need Krier’s illustrations to design a house, but understanding his thinking may help you to think about housing, and I think his commentary-by-drawing is worthwhile.

How was it possible that any simple farmer could make a house, a thousand times more beautiful than all the struggling architects of the last fifty years could do?

Or — still simpler — how, for instance, could he make a barn? What is it that an individual farmer did, when he decided to build a barn, that made his barn a member of this family of barns, similar to hundreds of other barns, yet nevertheless unique?

The proper answer to the question … lies in the fact that every barn is made of patterns.
 — Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

The second book you should read is The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. Alexander proposes that our intuitive love of many beautiful places rests on a certain quality that remains nameless. While it may be hard to define, it is easy to notice, and you have no doubt encountered it in beautiful cottages, gardens, temples, ancient city centers, and other places. The quality makes a place feel so natural we almost forget that these places were the careful and deliberate work of people.

Alexander wants us to work towards making these quality places, and sets about describing what he calls a pattern language for doing so. As I said before, beautiful places do not repeat identically the world over, but they do rhyme. There are patterns that make a place beautiful, not only in the design itself, but in the things that repeatedly happen there. When you design a restaurant or a breakfast nook, you are not just designing part of a building, but designing a place where people can enact rituals.

The aim of The Timeless Way of Building is to introduce these patterns and to give a clearer description of the things we intuitively consider important about our environments, but may have never verbalized before. I actually find his writing style a little silly, but the concepts are so important that I recommend this book to almost anyone interested in creating a beautiful and meaningful place, home or otherwise.

There are lots of other books worth reading, but the worst thing you could do is go buy a stack of books and then read none of them. Finish these first.

After that, you should probably look for a few books about architecture in your area. A great example for New England is Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England. It is extremely well-researched, and in supporting its central question (why did people build the way that they did), it offers a lot of insight that might help you plan and position the masses of your home. You are not a homesteading farmer from the 1800’s, but you do use the rooms of your house in repeatable ways, and you should give as much thought to your daily use and patterns as these settlers did when designing their own home layouts.

Unfortunately, I think the book A Field Guide to American Houses is not particularly worth buying. It’s large, but surprisingly light on detail, and missing styles (such as the traditional New England saltbox). Better to find a book more focused on your area.

Starting the Designs: Sketch and Copy

I recommend you draw and sketch a lot — until you feel very comfortable doing it. Sketch facades freeform, with the ruler, etc. Sketching from photos is much easier than sketching from your mind, so you may want to start there. If you have any beloved houses from your childhood, you should try to sketch out their facades and floorplans from memory, too. The more houses you sketch, the more you will notice some patterns feel intuitively right about their design.

I suggest you start designing by copying existing designs and floor plans, if you have some that you like, and trying to modify them. It is almost always easier to begin with an existing good design, and think about how you can adapt it to your own needs and land conditions, than trying to start from a purely abstract blank slate. Many excellent homes are traditional, and all traditional homes are derivative. Whenever possible, you should build upon the careful thought of others.

We often have several of different sizes of sketchbook and notepad laying around, though I prefer the brands with dot-grids.

If you don’t have land yet, you probably shouldn’t be married to a particular design. Not all building pockets are flat, and the orientation of the house may be affected by other things, such as the road, especially if it requires a short driveway. Without knowing these, its difficult to know which direction the sun will be coming from, what windows might overlook the backyard or neighbors house, and so on. Your final design should not be a paper abstraction, but should feel intimately tied to the surrounding land.

Once the house design is finalized and construction begins, you’ll want to continue sketching, this time for landscape design. If you choose to pay for landscaping (we didn’t), you’ll probably want a basic design done by the time the construction is finished. If you’re like us, you’ll be designing and landscaping for the next 5 years. Or more.

An early garden plan:

An early scene, viewed from the house’s back doors, 2018:

And early July 2022. This year’s drought was starting to wear on things. We planted the sugar maple and plane tree (bottom of picture), lilacs, a magnolia, and some other things from original plans. The chicken coop from our plan is also present, but hidden behind a large autumn olive tree, near the upper left. And a barn (the Goose Palace) is present too, but a bit farther from the house than our sketch, and hidden in this photo:

Collect

If you have a good idea of what you want to build, you can start buying fixtures long before you break ground. Also, visiting some architectural salvage stores in your area early might help you to get ideas.

There are a number of sites that sell interesting house hardware, parts like cabinet pulls, doorknobs, light fixtures, tile, door knockers, and other details. If you find any you like, sign up for email promotions, and you may find sites that routinely offer 20% or more off sales. With a little planning, you can sign up for them and wait for the next sale. Some sites have big sales only one or two times a year, so it pays to consider what hardware you want fairly early in the process. The place where this might really matter are for water and light fixtures, and tile manufacturers (we used a lot from Cle Tile). You could save thousands in tile and shipping costs by timing a sale.

Note that some sites, like House of Antique Hardware, are often just reselling other brands with a markup. For example the fairly standard brass cabinet pulls on their site are actually just Emtek brand pulls, which you can get for cheaper from sites like build.com.

Buying pulls and knobs sold as lots on eBay is sometimes cheaper than sale prices. If you find expensive knobs you like on one site, go to eBay and search the product name.

Retail isn’t the only place to find fixtures of course. To add to the old feel of our house, we bought some antique and architectural salvage lights and hardware, which you’ll see in the post on materials. For this eBay, Etsy, yard sales, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and architectural salvage companies (There are a lot in New England) are easy sources.

In the next post we’ll go over the elements, heating and cooling, and how these affect our design. Or it will be about materials and hardware, if I get to that first. My daughter was born on August 12th, so I may be a bit delayed in writing for a while. This post was mostly finished before then, and I only now edit it, in the mild delirium of newborn nights.

This newsletter is called The Map Is Mostly Water, and is about a number of topics.

This house design post is part of a series inside that newsletter, called Everyday Aesthetics.

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity ← You are here. Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — What we built with

7. Light

8. The Studio

9. The Kitchen

10. …

We have a common language to talk about what makes up any house. You could describe a house, for instance, as a 5-bedroom Georgian Colonial, with a garage on the northern side, and a patio out back. Features like these, plus façades and floor plans, can be called the large decisions.

But there are an enormous number of small decisions that go into a house, and in a sense these are more important for you to understand. If you are making something magnificent and using a time-tested floorplan, but you get the details wrong, you can end up with a house that is awkward, even uncanny. On the other hand, even if you can only afford a modest home, a few good details in the right places can make it exceptionally pleasing.

Some of these details are obvious, like the options for flooring and doors. Others are more subtle, like door hinges and the type and placement of light switches, or radiators. Even with flooring, after perhaps selecting a wood type, you must further select a stain (or not), and some kind of finish, such as polyurethane or having them oiled. And something more basic: What are the walls made of?

And what happens when a wall ends?

Walls are fundamental, but few builders or architects will bother asking you if you wanted something other than paint-over-drywall. Instead, they may only ask about color. (They will, hopefully, at least ask about trim.)

For our house, we chose plaster walls throughout, which is slightly more expensive than drywall, with the intention of keeping them raw. That means there was no painting required, unlike drywall, except on the trim.

I mention plaster walls not because I think you should choose them, but that you ought to know they are an option, and its very possible that no builder or architect would even bring it up as a possibility to you. To put it another way, every single decision you do not make, some architect or builder or contractor is either going to have to ask you, or in many cases they are simply going to make it for you. And you cannot rely on them asking you.

An example from our project: We never specified what we wanted for the gravel bed that typically surrounds a house foundation, which is done as a weed barrier and to reduce splashing at the drip line. (You don’t want vegetation touching your house generally: In southern climates you risk termites, in humid climates you risk wood rot, etc.) Since we never asked about this, our builder simply ordered common granite chip gravel, which is somewhat coarse and ugly. Over time we dug it out by hand and replaced it with pea gravel, which we find more attractive. This would have been easy to get right had we known it was even an option to consider, and wouldn’t have incurred the extra expense, waste, and labor.

So you must acquaint yourself with the details and small decisions of home design. Professionals you work with will not always ask, they will in many cases simply pick the most common option, perhaps out of laziness or simply wanting to speed things along, or because they assume that if you do not ask about it, you do not care. This of course contributes to the sameness experienced in most new construction. Many builders themselves seem to forget that there are options.

Developing a visual curiosity

What then, are you to do?

The world is built from materials. I recommend that you become obsessed with finding out what they are. What are your walls made of? Interior? Exterior? The most beautiful places you go regularly, can you remember what the floors are made of? Return and look. What about at your work? The gym? Think about the tiles in the bathrooms you visit, even commercial, on the floors and walls. What colors are they? What makes up the ceiling of your basement? Can you see how the floor is built?

What’s your kitchen table made out of? Is it wood, or does it just look like wood? How are the legs fastened to the top? Why do some wood floors look like shiny plastic? Why do some showers look dumpy, and others luxurious? What makes them feel this way? Is it the tile? The floor material? A liner? The lighting?

You must take notice when you find beautiful places. It is not just materials and components that create these places, but patterns and interactions between materials. Beautiful places do not repeat identically the world over, but they do rhyme. I suggest you start to collect some of these places.

The easiest way to do this is to build two photo libraries: One for more general “mood” aesthetics, and one for specific items or designs you might want in your house.

I suggest starting with two digital albums to collect these photos, in whatever service you might use. One album to get a sense of the moods or styles you like. They can clash and be wildly different, including totally unrealistic where you live, but its important to have them on hand. You will want to go back to them often and think about what makes each special to you later. If you end up working with an architect, you will want this to show them, too.

I suggest you keep revisiting and adding to the pictures you save, and ponder them often, just as you revisit the cherished art in your life. You do not need to become an expert in anything, but you do need to see enough environments you like to start having feelings about the differences in them.

After this, you will want to make a second album to record all of the specific things you’d like to see in specific rooms: Tiles, trim, window styles, exterior styles, knobs, appliances, baseboards, molding, cabinets, everything. Maybe you will not learn the names of all these things, but you need some way of communicating them to the professionals you work with to ensure that appropriate hardware and trim are ordered.

I highly recommend you do the same on Pinterest, making at least two boards to separate general aesthetics and your-house-project specifics. For our home we made one large Pinterest board, which has a number of sub-boards to separate pins out by room. Long after construction, we still use Pinterest for keeping track of decoration ideas, landscape planning, and ideas for additions. I am separately collecting ideas for cottages, if I ever get the chance to build another (smaller) home.

If you’re building a house together with someone, you should share and use these albums to talk about what you love and hate about design together. Aesthetic disagreements (and ultimately agreements) can be very useful for paring down design ideas from a large set.

A small note about Beauty

If you are going to build a custom home at all, you should strive to make it both functional and beautiful. Where to put laundry machines is important, but how to make an enchanting breakfast nook, or an enchanting anything, will have a larger effect on your life. You home is more than just a place to sleep and do chores, it must also be a place where you can enact daily rituals, and let its beauty dawn on you. To achieve this is possible at any budget. Your home does not need to be palatial—it is a terrible misconception to equate beauty with luxury (or as many modern artists and architects do, to confuse beauty with novelty). Simplicity and modesty have their own beauty. But it does require care on the part of the creator, and this care is what’s clearly lacking from the homes you are avoiding by building your own. It should be beautiful in whatever way you can make it beautiful.

“Home” is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others there, in order to dwell poetically in a place. It is worth cultivating an understanding of beauty and rituals as compelling forces, and it is worth listening when environments speak to you, even if you never have the chance to design a home. (Regardless of where they live, most people have more control over their environment — and their environment has more control over them — than they realize.)

If this seems weird to you, consider for a moment how often people in a pretty cafe, one with good presentation, are compelled to take pictures of their food or drinks. Notice also how they do not do this at home when popping a plastic K-cup into their machine. Only one conjures a little bit of enchantment. This is something such a photographer yearns to capture, something they want to linger with them. This is the power of a small ritual graced by some beauty. But it does not have to be confined to spaces outside your home, and you should think hard about your own nature and what simple activities are important to you, and make sure they are incorporated into the love of your home.

Developing a spatial curiosity

Before you can make floor plans, you need a sense of appropriate sizes for different rooms. Eventually, once you have some floor plans, you will want to make computer visualization mockups, and go to an empty parking lot with some chalk or tape and draw the plans so that you can try them out by walking around in them. But not yet: Due to the openness, it’s a big mistake to assume that walking around the chalk house design will feel like being in such a house. To accurately size rooms for a floor plan, you should start in already-built homes.

Get a tiny tape measure

Get at least a 16-foot tape measure, ideally a little one you can carry everywhere, and start measuring every room you enter. Measure your bedroom, your hallways, your office or cubical if you have one. Measure your bathrooms, your friends bathrooms, kitchens, everywhere. Any time you come across a room and think “this is about how big I want a bedroom to be” or “this is a great size for a kitchen island”, you need to measure it (and measure the distance between the island and the counter, too). To get a feel for how big the rooms of your house will be, there is no substitute for being in realistically sized rooms of other homes. Only once you have done this can you start drawing realistic floor plans.

(Also: Get a second tape measure and leave it in your car).

What if you have never been in the kind of house that you’d like to build?

It is worth spending some time on Zillow, looking for houses with floor plans that you do like. Then go tour them, think about their layout, and measure the relevant rooms. The agents (probably) won’t think you’re crazy. This is preferable to do during real estate open houses, so you’re not wasting the realtor’s time.

Some historic town centers have old home tours (or “holiday house tours”) as fundraiser events. Many old homes have been converted into museums. If you haven’t been in many historic houses in your area, you should go see some. In New England, these are not at all difficult to find.

Pondering homes

As you think about the spaces you visit, try to be aware of all the things you don’t see in the houses you like (or at all). For example, houses rarely have exterior doors opening right into the living room. There is usually some kind of portal, hallway, or transition between the outside world and the indoors. Kitchen windows typically don’t give a view of the street, but of the back yard, if there is one. It can be difficult to think about the absence of undesirable features, but realizing what’s not done is just as important as planning good features. You could call the repeatable good features patterns and bad ones anti-patterns, like they do in many fields. The existence of patterns is important enough that you should read a book about the subject. Recommended reading (among other things) will be in the next post.

~ ~ ~

This newsletter is called The Map Is Mostly Water, and is about a number of topics.

This house design post is part of a series inside that newsletter, called Everyday Aesthetics.

It will be a timber framed (or “post and beam”, or “post and bean” if you are my baby) structure, 12x16 feet with a loft, and a roof of wooden shingles. The largest timbers are themselves 8x8 inches, 16 feet long. Since they are freshly cut they weigh several hundred pounds. I move them around on pivots and rollers.

This project is somewhat confounded by the fact that I do not know how to timber frame.

This alone, of course, is a good reason to do it. I could start with small or piecemeal projects, but I think the best learning usually involves a certain amount of gravity or meaning in the project, even if the mistakes are more costly.

I call this the Goose Palace because it will be in effect a small barn for geese and other birds. But such a home for them could be done much more cheaply and easily with stick framing, an asphalt shingle roof, plywood, cement blocks, etc. Instead their home will be magnificent. If it is not a folly, perhaps it will outlive me.

Every old building that we admire for its beauty and longevity was the work of someone’s hand. But it is one thing to see the springs of the machine, it is another to work them. Like with software or the other arts, it can be difficult to appreciate the magnitude of something, or the care with which it was made, until you try to make it yourself. So I create this building to better ponder them all.

I will be following someone else’s plan, an old design. Like with designing my home, I rely on tradition to fill the gaps in my own knowledge, only this time I am building too. I would someday wish to design and build a whole cottage, but this is many years off.

~ ~ ~

I say together we are going to build the Goose Palace because subscriptions to my newsletter have covered the purchase of these timbers. So if you are a paying subscriber I thank you for your contribution to this art.

Of course it will take more than money. Love and effort create beautiful things, and I take vacation time here to get things done in an acceptable timeframe.

The cost, so far, is $2,118.40 for the timbers and roofing boards. I still need to purchase siding boards, flooring, cedar roof shingles (particularly pricey, but particularly beautiful), wooden pegs, and nails. I already have granite (miraculously, for free), which I have split into pieces for a foundation, and a large reclaimed granite piece purchased last year ($200) that I will use for the front step.

This is not an anachronistic project—I have nothing against power tools. I am using an electric drill and circular saw in addition to my chisels and pull-saws. Though I will not use a nailer, because I do not own one, and because it feels more fitting to affix each nail by hand, even on the roof.

What will it look like? We will both have to wait and see. Timber framing—especially as a novice working alone—requires a little faith. All the while I saw and chisel, but there is no visible progress on the building site, until at last the day of raising. But I’m a ways off from that still. I will write to you again, then.

Feel free to ask questions, of course. In a few weeks I hope to have better answers.

Part 2 — Building the Goose Palace

s s

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings ← You are Here

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — What we built with

7. Light

8. The Studio

9. The Kitchen

10. …

In March of 2018, Simplicity and I bought three small former haying fields overrun with pine trees in southern New Hampshire, just outside a historic village. Our goal was to build a traditional-looking house that we designed.

We wanted to give attention to aesthetic and functional features that are absent in many newer homes, such as thoughtful use of light, space, ventilation, and some passive cooling. It seemed like it would be possible to design something more attractive and with fewer complications than most new homes. We did not have a large budget, certainly not a typical “custom house” budget, but we figured that with some careful tradeoffs, and by doing some of the finishing ourselves, we could build something modestly beautiful.

This series will detail our project and what we’ve learned, including what we wish we did differently. We will share as much advice as we can, from how we think about design and planning, down to what we paint with and how we finished our floors. If you plan to build or design your own home, we hope you will find it useful.

If this sounds familiar, it is because parts of this series were originally published on Medium. They are being expanded and completed here.

Looking for Homes, Finding Land

Our original plan was to buy an old home and renovate it. We expected to teach ourselves a number of skills by working with a house that needed care and improvements, and then maybe 10 or 15 years later, we might be ready to build our own. I still think this is the preferred route, and underrated for most young couples who enjoy spending time trying to make something beautiful. Fate veered us differently, however. In the next town over from my birthplace we made two offers on 1800’s homes, and backed out of both upon inspections during which we discovered there was hopelessly too much to fix for our budget.

Near to one of the houses we had hoped to buy, there were a few acres for sale. The land was overrun with pines and vines (including poison ivy), but it was quite pretty. It was within walking distance to the village, with one side up against a small forest, and you could easily tell it was a former pasture. Its setting had the rare quality of feeling both open and secluded. With love and attention we had no doubt it would be beautiful.

In fact, compared to most “building lots” it had such potential for a pretty setting that we were surprised to find the land had been on the market for almost two years when we stumbled upon it. The land was expensive, however, and used up a large part of our prospective budget. Some things are worth overpaying for, even if you have to compromise elsewhere. It is nice to have a rare occasion when the choice is so clear.

With plenty of hope and a little delusion, we set about figuring out what a construction loan would be like, and how far a budget could go if we built something as beautiful yet simple as possible. We did not aim to build a minimalist house, but we would accept an austere beauty over a compromising ugliness, with the hope that it would grow as we do.

The clearest tradeoff we could make was to do all the landscaping ourselves. After the sale, each day after work and every weekend, we would go to the land to cut down trees with axes and electric chainsaws. Eventually a friend with a tractor sped this up, especially with moving brush. But rather than steamroll the land into open space, we have tried to work slowly and on-foot when possible, saving alders, blueberries, and wild flowering crabapple trees We knew it would take years to discover everything that is truly here, and want to keep as many of its secrets as possible.

What‘s the matter with modern homes?

Before we go over our learning and planning for a traditional home, it’s important to take a scrutinizing look at modern homes. I want to talk about the process of making a home without wallowing in complaints about modern housing, but they must be mentioned just enough to give you an idea of all the things we hoped to avoid. I think most people have an intuitive sense that older homes are often special, and newer ones are often not, even if the reasons are not immediately obvious. (Of course some of this is just survivorship bias: Many uninspiring old homes existed, but did not last.)

Growing up in an 1840’s house in New Hampshire, many features of modern homes stand out immediately:

• They seem designed primarily to maximize one thing: the square-footage number that will be on the listing when it’s sold. Maximizing for this not only comes at the cost of everything else on the budget, it also leads to ridiculous room designs, random chasms, and dead space. An eye towards making the best sale does not create the best living space.

• Carpet has replaced wood flooring. $1/sqft tile (or linoleum) has replaced the rest. Very cheap looking tile fills even expensive homes.

• Hardware is of poor quality, even in half-million-dollar-plus homes. Cheap and ugly faucets, light fixtures, doorknobs, and paper-thin doors dominate. While somewhat understandable in the least expensive new construction, it’s surprising to me to find these things in more expensive homes.

• While many modest old homes have low ceilings, you’ll still find ceilings both unnervingly too low and way too high in modern homes, such as sudden 2-story living rooms, or 2-story “lawyer foyer” entryways. They exist out of all proportion with the rest of the house.

• Availability of electric light has allowed builders to ignore the sun. They do this to such an extent that some modern homes need the lights turned on at almost all times, for example, to use a kitchen in the morning at breakfast. Many rooms have few or only one window, while hallways often have none at all. Often windows (or the lack thereof) offer neither good light, nor a view, nor provide a pretty façade from the outside.

• “Forced air” duct heating and cooling has allowed builders to ignore window-based ventilation. Modern homes have almost no concept of airflow outside of these systems. Even in houses with central air systems, rooms get too hot, or too cold, and people living in the houses sometimes must install window AC units (in houses that already have central air!) or keep windows open in the winter to moderate these failures.

There are more subtle aesthetic problems.

As the availability of stores like Home Depot (founded 1978) and Lowes (21 stores in the 1960’s) spread — both have over 2000 stores each today — the commodification of house hardware intensified. Today it is easier to find the things you are looking for quickly, for example if you need a replacement doorknob. This also means that everyone’s doorknobs look exactly the same. As manufacturers and distributors consolidate while carrying only a few brands, the details of houses homogenize. As they converge in style, people stop considering the hardware as a choice at all, and so everything becomes even more of the same. Through this sameness the hardware became a cost that could now be cut.

Standardization is typical of the aesthetic deep state: before you can choose any options, you are limited by which choices are even available. In theory, availability through the internet could put a stop to this. It’s easier than ever to find small companies making nicer, more interesting hardware, and it’s easier to find antique hardware via eBay, Etsy, and companies that salvage old house parts, or make restoration and period hardware. But builders don’t care, which leads us to the next problem.

Homes are not built by people intending to live in them. Instead, they are built by builders, who mostly want to flash-form “units” —as many as possible, as fast as possible, out of sticks and drywall. Everything from sunlight to cabinet pulls becomes not just an afterthought, but a non thought. The major architectural decision is how to maximize square-footage, over all else, in order to maximize sale price. This is because at some point in the past consumers wanted more space, and space (considered as square-footage) was an easy, legible metric to aim for. It is so integral today that every real estate site will put exactly three details next to the price, and it is one of them:

4 beds 3 baths 3,018 sqft

The other variables faded into the nondescript sameness of whatever the big suppliers were selling. Since housing is not exactly a commodity, and new construction is dominated by bigger developers, this is hard to change, even if all new house buyers would prefer something wildly different than such a status quo.

One might think that custom and expensive homes would be in a class above. This is not nearly as true as I’d expect. So many bad homes have been built in the last 70 years that it appears even high-priced home designs do not consider aesthetics or the elements. I suspect this is partly because the customer still does not demand it, and partly because few builders are actually thinking very much when they design houses, instead they are aping other designs, and the designs they are aping are often the poorly-conceived McMansions.

This million dollar new construction house is at least trying to avoid the typical McMansion exterior aesthetic faults, but still has glaring deficiencies: Bedrooms 2 and 3 contain only one window each, and all the hallways (three masses) contain a single outside window between them, in the stairwell itself. There’s a square mass of upstairs hallway labeled Loft that is larger than the bedrooms, which is not the only useless hallway on display. This is new construction over a million dollars, and the listing gives no indication of where the sun is coming from, or any orientation info at all. They can’t imagine you’d care. Only from spying on Google Maps or the tax map can we sort-of guess that the bathroom, which has more windows than any upstairs bedroom (at two), will perhaps receive the southern sun. The hallways will have almost zero sun, and the ventilation will be provided from the basement.

I don’t want to dwell on bad homes. For that McMansion Hell by Kate Wagner has written quite a bit about the subject. But I do want you to have enough context to understand what we’re running from as we designed ours. Aside from the above complaints, many modern homes are simply ugly, inside and out. This is sometimes because they are too simple, but often it is the opposite: The pile of masses that are added to increase square footage often accompany useless cascading gables, complicated roof lines, cluttered features, and sometimes comical proportions.

~ ~ ~

Now we have covered enough of the why. The next post in this series will be about how we started—and what you can do—to develop your visual thinking and prepare as much of a design as possible before talking to any builders or architects.

The next part is here.

~ ~ ~

This newsletter is called The Map Is Mostly Water, and is about a number of topics.

This house design post is part of a series inside that newsletter, called Everyday Aesthetics.

If you want to see more photos of our house and the land, there are lots on Twitter, and also on my Instagram and Simplicity’s Instagram, though you may have to rummage through a lot of baby pictures and building projects to find them. The coming parts will include many photos as well.

“aesthetic deep state”: I think Beiser coined this term, many years ago.

“Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.”

—Christopher Alexander

One must encourage some level of enchantment to invite the supernatural. When nymphs dance, we picture them in idyllic settings, like forests and groves, or carousing in an orchard just before dawn. Perhaps the fruit from trees and vines that we find on the ground in the morning is their doing, after all.

We do not picture spirits dancing among brightly-lit supermarket aisles, no matter how bountiful the fruit is there. The fluorescent glow of warehouse lights and repetitive linoleum floors do not seem a good match. Whatever world the aisles do make, daydreams are different there.

It is worth thinking about these settings, not to criticize department stores, but in case their utilitarian influences have crept too far into the rest of our lives. Certain surroundings seem to dispel enchantment, and others encourage it. We take consolation in a good landscape. Architecture, good or bad, twists and turns our moods. Do our homes and public spaces resemble places of enchantment?

~ ~ ~

There has been a centuries-long trend towards visually flat and formulaic environments. The modern kitchen, with its leagues of uniform cabinets and counters, resembles a laboratory more than a hearth. Appliances and pots are steel. Cooking instruments are plastic or silicone. Everywhere in the house, faucets and lights are coated with chrome. If wood is used, it is no longer oiled, but coated with polyurethane. More recently, fully-plastic lookalikes have replaced wood floors and siding completely.

What spawned these design decisions? We might be tempted to call it a kind of minimalism, though I think this is inaccurate. The design minimalist did not invent vinyl siding or chrome or sparsely decorated, uniform spaces—they merely continued the broader trend. If we search out its advantages, the trend is trying to make environments that could be called open, uncluttered, free of distraction, easy to clean, and low-maintenance. These are often benefits, but we should never lose sight of the tradeoffs made in their deference. And we should ask ourselves, very carefully, if they are really the tradeoffs we want to make.

Let’s quickly look at a modern kitchen. These pictures are from a real estate listing, but I trust you know what otherwise fills the counters of a kitchen today. This house recently sold for $1.25 million, almost triple the town’s median house price:

The first impression to strike me is one of storage. There are so many cabinets! It could double as a grain silo. The overbuilt and glossy nature gives the kitchen an air of professionalism, though it borders on industrial. Nothing is dented. Everything can be hidden in cabinets. Nothing can be hidden in sight, for the lighting, above any other consideration, was engineered to ensure every surface is lit. Nothing is allowed a shadow, even underneath the cabinets, there is no place to veil the smallest object. In these ways it willingly resembles the warehouse or supermarket.

There are the typical sleek appliances, although the faucet is a limp hose held in place by a metal spring. In a house that aspires to affluence, there is something almost comically careless about it’s utilitarian nature. Yet if we take this kitchen to be an industrial storage room with a sink, it fits right in. Our trend-ideals from before are all present: open (the floor plan is practically see-through), uncluttered, free of distraction, easy to clean, and low-maintenance. I think professional fits in with these. It’s somewhat reminiscent of an operating room, more than what a kitchen was for most of time. We could try to come up with a name for this. High modernism is how James Scott described the overarching desire for an ultra-legible world. Or we could call it gloss utilitarian, or something like that.

Here begins the tradeoff. Professional or utilitarian contrast deeply with personal or domestic. Aren’t those the words that ought to describe the home and kitchen instead? Professional-grade tools are good. But do we really want a professional feel to our homes? Do we need floodlights? Do we even want the gloss of polished floors and countertops and chrome, attempting to make sure every surface is never dulled?

Let us change directions, and sharpen our senses. Here is an old painting:

As a study of materials, the scene is quite interesting. The terra-cotta floor tiles are worn and cracked, a clay jug is broken, the plaster walls are pitted and fraying to reveal bricks. The copper and tin milk churn on the left, and pot on the bottom right show the dents of wear. Wood is gently splitting on the window and elsewhere. Even the wicker basket is frayed, with reeds missing from the back, poking out to the left. Like every great painter, Willem Laquy must have felt the world viscerally to attend himself to such details.

What is the primary feeling of this scene? Despite the material damage, the subjects are clearly not poor, nor are they bothered. There is domestic merriment. There is hint of affluence. The lady, sporting a fur-lined jacket, plucks a partridge, and inspects fish that the maid brought. The little girl plays with a (ridiculously groomed) dog. There are vegetables on the floor, perhaps the child knocked them over, perhaps the artist wanted to signify a carefree abundance, or perhaps he simply wanted to afford the viewer a better look. Unlike photography, nothing is ever in a painting by accident.

There are four potential sources of light in the room: The window, a lantern, a candle, and the hearth. It is a beautiful touch for Laquy to paint a lantern there, to show off the soft diffused light of its glass from the sun, letting us imagine what it might look like at night. So even the flames, currently absent, would offer us different shades of light and darkness.

~ ~ ~

Finally, a few details from my own kitchen. The candles are wobbly, Simi dipped them. The wood implements I carved and oiled from mostly wild cherry—they naturally darken over time, you can tell which is the newest. Copper and brass are shunned today as high maintenance. But this is a mistake, they are not meant to be polished endlessly, to ape at a forever gloss. Instead, the patina is a testament to its use, an indication that the object is alive. It is nice to polish occasionally, but only to admire a temporary brilliance before watching the beauty of aging again. Raw brass darkens, copper takes on a full scene.

These images above cannot be literally compared, they are not of the same thing. But I hope you see how the differences contribute to the atmospheres. Handcrafted objects, textured colors, unpainted and unpolished surfaces (my walls show their raw plaster), natural materials, sunlight and shadow—all of these are signs of life. Life accepts the imperfect and the changing. The domestic need not be flamboyant—though sometimes it is magnificent to be so—after all my kitchen and Laquy’s are far from neon. But no kitchen or home should look lifeless. The design cues of the modern home are grasping at a kind of modernist perfectionism, and become flat because all life is removed in the process. Professional atmospheres (restaurant kitchens, warehouses, operating rooms) are antiseptic, often they need to be, so they simply banish life. The domestic result are spaces, like the richo kitchen above, that feel inert.

Spatially, the minimalist and glossy-modernist trends have the unfortunate habit of moving toward a void. Maximizing for space leads to a lack of spaces. We remove mystery and coziness in ever simpler and sparser designs. Open, uncluttered, free of distraction, easy to clean, low-maintenance, professional: The ethos needed to properly oppose these trends is intimacy.

Intimacy is not clutter, but the proper demarcation of space. To lure back enchantment, we must learn to create the nook, to appreciate the wilder garden, to consider the power of shadows and small spaces, to welcome living materials over insensate ones. There is no formula that can easily arrive at intimacy, only a sensitivity to context that can be cultivated. If we look beyond the economic and utilitarian world, we will find a secret one waiting for us.

More another time, about this intimacy,

s s

~ ~ ~

This is the first post of Everyday Aesthetics, a series tucked inside this newsletter. It will be about making beauty and learning how to see. To try and make something beautiful is a way to learn what is beautiful.

My notes on home design (originally on Medium) will also be expanded here, with a more detail about how we made our house, and how we are still making our gardens, and other building projects.

The first painting is Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, by John Signer Sargent, 1885

For Tamara Winter