I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a house feel like home.
It isn’t necessarily the prettiest room or the most expensive furniture. And it certainly isn’t making every house look like whatever is fashionable at the moment.
Increasingly, the conversations we have with clients aren’t really about aesthetics at all.
They tell us they want their kids to spend more time downstairs instead of disappearing into their bedrooms. They want a kitchen where everyone gathers. They want to entertain more easily. They want their house to feel warmer, more interesting, less formal, or simply more like them. Those conversations are a much more interesting starting point for design than asking someone whether they prefer blue or green.
Of course, I care about how rooms look. I love color and pattern, and throughout the design process I’m constantly asking myself, “How can we make this special?”
Beauty for the sake of beauty isn’t enough.
A room can be visually perfect and still not be the room anyone wants to spend time in. The harder and more interesting part is figuring out how a house can encourage the life people actually want to have there. Sometimes that means changing the way rooms connect. Sometimes it’s creating a kitchen where there’s room for everyone to gather without being in the cook’s way. Sometimes it’s giving kids a place they feel like belongs to them. And sometimes it’s less tangible: making a house feel more relaxed, more welcoming or more like the people who live there.
I have a weakness for old houses, which adds another piece to the puzzle.
Families live differently today than they did a hundred years ago, so old houses have to evolve. The challenge is making those changes without stripping away the things that made the house interesting in the first place. I like the tension between old and new.
This feels particularly relevant this month because one of our Newton projects is on the Fall cover of Boston Home, our first cover. The kitchen is on the cover, but it was part of a much larger whole-house project. Throughout the house, we balanced the character of an old home with the way this particular family wanted to live in it now. We opened some things up, kept other spaces the same, introduced a lot of color and pattern, and looked for places to do something a little unexpected.
The result feels very much like our client, which is what I’m most proud of.