When you design homes, those who live in them are your circumstantial intimates. And, sometimes, far more. After about 700 residential projects—some new, others recreated—many of my “clients” became people I love, and who in turn love me and my family. If we’re lucky enough to live long enough, both the clients and the designer change.

There is nothing magic about aging. We connect/disconnect/spawn/break—and until death do us part, the humans and the homes that we create together become our dance partners in the lifetimes we design. That choreography is both anticipated and desperate in reaction, like everyone’s life. This month, clients are installing the elevator we designed into the floor framing of the house we built together 18 years ago. Others are adding a bedroom at grade. I am old enough, have been designing long enough, that homes have lost those who built them. Owners are alive, but their marriages, minds, and bodies are changed.

We change to the point of death, but the humanity of the home creator does not. I know this is true because I regularly work for early 30-year-olds: who want children, or don’t want children, are in career creation, or career rejection, so I’m creating a place for the unnumbered years ahead. Including, sometimes, the parents I previously designed for moving in with them. This is providing a service, but homes are different—for those who live in them, and for those who create them with those living in them.

Why?

Let’s call it the miracle of humanity. In the wash of a benign, unthinking world that sustains, inspires, and, yes, threatens us, our homes are the vessels of our hopes and faith. Safety is paramount for the dwellings of all living things, but safety and instinct alone are inadequate. The desire to strive for something beyond survival, the time and risk of going beyond minimum requirements, means humans know beauty, and when that ephemeral truth is locked into a nexus with each of our most immediate hopes, the intimacies become real. 

I teach a course called HOME at the University of Hartford, where the semester is centered on the creation of a tiny home, on a real site, anywhere, with the designer being the occupant. In this effort we read books like Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own and seminal texts about home builders in history. Gaston Bachelard, in the 1958 book The Poetics of Space, wrote, “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house. I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Before he built his idyl, Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about his friend’s home, “I that found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love or retirement, simplicity, etc.,” then proceeded to erect his own.

Nothing has changed since Thoreau, Bachelard, and Pollan. But every human wants the place they hope for and feel they need. Because our homes are a mirror of who we are. So we try to make ourselves in our homes. When designers are part of that creation, the intimacies of those we design with could be seen as part of “just doing business.” 

But two truths of homemaking cannot be avoided by the designer: (1) Just like clients, we are humans, not salespeople, or AI databases, or even just scribes of ideas; we’re the humans that we design for. So we care beyond necessity, we’re fearful of the loss of our hopes in the homeowner’s dreams, and we are thrilled at their ideas. And that also means that (2) in everything we do, including giving life to the hopes of home creators, the passage of time goes beyond the moment the paint has dried.

The impact of time is dramatic evidence of how our homes serve as harbors for our lives’ aspirations, changes, and, if we’re lucky enough, through the aging we cannot avoid. Designers see the launch of all the hopes of any home, and then bear witness to the humanity that plays out its drama within the walls we helped create. And time changes the humans in the home more than the building itself. The metaphors of building-and-occupants aging are hollow to the designer, because any object can be remade new again. And yet, despite the powers of medicine, nutrition, and exercise, we ourselves cannot be remade. The designer lives the hopes the home manifests despite the inevitabilities of aging.

Those unchanging shared intimacies of hope and fear and faith of home creation go beyond the transactions of most other things in our lives. Unlike the episodic encounter with a chef or a fashion designer, the continuity of an architect’s incorporation into the lives of our clients is more akin to a psychotherapist, one who knows both the origin story and the life evolution of those who bond with each other to make a home. But like a priest or rabbi, the designer sees more than the individual. The spiritual expression of faith in the future a home embodies is a gift given to us.

Either by design or circumstance, we make our houses. When architects help birth them, the places we make often outlive us and the histories of what we make. In the rough-and-tumble world of construction that beauty can be forgotten, but it’s why we and our clients are alive.

Featured image from the author. This is a home for a lab assistant and high school history teacher, now getting a primary bedroom on the first floor next year.