Let's talk about home
What a delightfully simple word to describe something that is truly sacred.
If we think about what a home really represents at any given time, it is so much more than just space to lay our heads. It is where we return to at the end of each day, but it is also where we bring our newborn babies home from the hospital, it is where we stay when we are sick, where we gather when we grieve, or when we celebrate. It is where we welcome our friends and family. It is the one tiny little piece of built world where we get the chance to celebrate all those little things that make our day to day, our own day to day. No matter what your family or life looks like, home is meant to be your place to celebrate it in all its crazy glory.
As we have recently learned, our homes are also where we retreat during times of trouble and uncertainty.
When thinking about the past few years, we have asked our homes to carry an immense burden. In the last few years alone, my home has been asked to help shelter my family from bushfires, months of toxic smoke, drought, heat waves, a hail storm, and a global pandemic. On top of that, my home was also asked to be an office, and a school.
In a strange way, it is now the brief we are given for each and every home we are commissioned to design. We are asking these humble little buildings to be just about everything, to everyone.
But since we know and love, that everyone and every family is unique, we wonder why we continue to see our suburbs, both new and old, filled with homes that are all the same.
How can we possibly think that there is a one-size-fits all approach that will work for every family, and everyone. Many times, we get left with big houses filled with more things than people, increasingly unaffordable for large numbers of our community. We get the same house design no matter what country onto which it is built, a move proving disastrous for our planet, and we get increasingly less space- space for our homes, and ourselves, to breathe a little.
Building smaller, building only what we need, no more, no less, leaves us all far more space to actually live. Embracing the fact that maybe we all want different things from our homes will lead us to a place where we have homes of all shapes and sizes, homes full of fun and whimsy, full of character and life. What a wonderful place that would be.
Our homes are scared. They need to be less about space and a tick list of inclusions, and more about the people that will inhabit them, about the country and climate in which they are to be built, and about the space left in between them.