Forty years ago, I woke up on my 29th birthday after spending the first night in the home my wife and I built. There’s a long history of young architects who design their parents’ home, or their own home—something, anything, to make their bones as a designer outside the grinding path of apprenticeship and licensing. Robert Venturi did a house for his mother, Vanna. Frank Gehry renovated a house for his family before anyone hired him. Even Alvar Aalto and Walter Gropius honed their design skills on residences for themselves.

Forty-one years ago, the challenges were more varied. In 1983, variable-rate mortgages were at a whopping 18%, but we had saved enough money to buy a piece of land. After four years together, my wife and I were in launch mode. I was licensed, Liz was in law school; I had written my first book and become a partner with a great architect. We were in a place where things could happen.

A banker trusted us, and after five years of house sitting and saving, we purchased a 1.25-acre lot that had sat unsold for more than two years. Then I found a wonderful builder who believed it could be a great project to work on. (We ended up pairing together for 20 more over the next three decades.)
I was an intern, and then a partner, with Louis Mackall, who was a partner with Ken Field in Breakfast Woodworks, so I had had five years to help design other projects by the time we came to build our home. And I built more for that learning purpose.

For our house, Liz and I made the trim, and I helped make the countertops, doors, and shelves. And we then painted everything, bought and delivered rejected radiators, installed scores of items. There were loose ends, but we could live there: a one-bedroom, one-bathroom house, whose land and building costs were less than the condominiums across town. We also knew how and where to transform our initial pod into a three-bedroom home.

Since we were a childless couple, it was a pretty simple domicile. The place was wonderful, with the nine interior wall tones and colors we painted, the band of white cedar shingles miraculously thought of minutes before the red cedar shingle siding reached where it was to go, using sliding glass doors as windows with transoms we made, and a deck of leftover teak scantlings from boat builders, the last legal bits of old-growth redwood and cedar seating structure, all with stainless-steel fittings that remain visually identical to their original state. 

I asked my mentor, Louis, to take some photos, and since I had a good relationship with McGraw-Hill, the publisher of my first book, I submitted a bunch of materials to the 1985 Record House Competition for Architectural Record. It was then the single greatest honor any house could receive in America, and perhaps the world. It won.

With about 20 other homes, from Herb Newman’s own home to Fred Fisher’s thoughtful California house, our 1,100-square-foot, modest home was on a four-page spread that captured the unbridled hubris of ignorance being overcome with effort. In all of this, I had to ask my parents for $1,000 to tide us over, as our credit cards were maxed out and we had zero money left.

That validation launched a career. I was asked to teach at Roger Williams College, and to write a book on small houses, then have the home in House Beautiful. We had no furniture, so House Beautiful’s senior editor, Susan Zevon, and I went to places in New York City to borrow furniture (with “on-page credit”), and the magazine purchased foundation plants (since replanted around our property).

We had no topsoil and so purchased $200 worth of “sandy loam” dirt that was, in truth, clay, and two 12-hour-day weekends made for grass planting that sprouted just high enough for House Beautiful’s photos. 

The last 35 years saw the anticipated two-bedroom addition, an internal renovation, and then the first accessory dwelling unit in our town—built (and used) as our “summer house” and gym, created because we could add 2/3 of an acre for its septic system to our land.

Events flowed from our place in the world: 27 “garden” interventions: many failed, some were insanely successful. Two multiply degreed children, 38 years of my office, 30 years of my wife’s career, seven more books, 1,000 other buildings, hundreds of friends, several missions, including living into the gifts that we have been given by a God we know and have no understanding of.

The professional cynicism of making something to get recognition was not on our radar. We just wanted a place to live that was not house-sitting and that we owned. It was built for something over $100,000 in 1984, including the land. There was no genius in any of this, just inspiration. Any luck we had was as real as all the failed options we explored before we found our site. But there was one indispensable necessity: a complete devotion to building.

All photos courtesy of the author.