The happiness of place

Last week, parked on Martha’s Vineyard in Menemsha facing the harbor on a grey, cold day, I was in a happy place.  My husband was interviewing some local fishermen in a nearby boat for a story he’s writing.  I was bundled in a down coat and polar-fleece hat, absorbing the waning heat from the car ride up Island.  I had a new novel to entertain me, which I’d bought the day before at the 50%-off end-of-season sale at Edgartown Books.  It was a pretty entertaining and somewhat ribald read (This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper) about a dysfunctional, East-Coast family of adults sitting shiva for the family patriarch, an atheist. 

In between pages, I looked through the windshield at the battered fishing boat strapped to the dock below and the group of men huddled inside the wheel house.  I could see my husband’s wool-capped head bent over his reporter’s note pad.  A glance to my right revealed more of the nearly empty parking lot, wind-blown beach and frozen breakwater beyond.  Then back to my book.  This was cozy bliss.

We all know of places we associate with happiness.  It might be your childhood home, your kitchen, a garden, a town square, even a market.  I could make a long list.  I imagine sometimes we’re projecting what we feel on these places, and other times these places are projecting themselves on our feelings.  If we could decipher the specific qualities of the places which make us happy, then, surely, we could create places with incorporate those characteristics in order to foster our happiness.  This is, in part, the subject of Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness which I reviewed here.

When I apply my understanding of architectural space to my experience parked in Menemsha, I realize part of what appealed to me was my ability to experience a larger space or vista from within the comfort of a bordering, more intimate space.  At first thought, a car can seem like a pretty confining, aesthetically-cold environment.  Yet car interiors are designed specifically to accommodate human proportions and scale.  The seat hugs your form.  The glass is positioned to maximize view.  Controls are within arm’s reach.  It’s a personal container.  From within the car, I could observe the greater setting and another personal container, the boat my husband occupied.  I can imagine a house with a similar disposition: smaller spaces accommodating different activities, arranged within sight of each other, possibly at slightly different levels, and open to a shared common space within an expansive vista.  I think I would be happy there.

Lately, I’ve noticed a new wave of media interest in happiness.  Head Butler reviewed The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin just the other day.  PBS has been airing a NOVA/Vulcan Productions, Inc. series since Monday titled “This Emotional Life: In Search of Ourselves and Happiness” hosted by Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness.  Tonight’s episode, the third and last in the series, is titled Rethinking Happiness.  As in Gilbert’s book, it will likely touch on our frequent inability to properly predict what will make us happy. 

It seems to me that the first step toward happiness is recognizing it when we feel it.  Small moments can be full of happiness.  My recommendation: acknowledge and appreciate those moments; then take a step back and look at the factors contributing to the happiness you experience; build your life and home to capitalize on what you understand makes you happy.

After an hour or so in the car with my book, my husband returned for his camera, never expecting the interview with the fishermen to have taken so long.  “Are you cold?” he asked.  The heat from the car ride had dissipated, but I hadn’t noticed.  “No, not really,” I responded.  He said he would be back shortly and shut the door.  I smiled, watched him return to the boat, and adjusted the book in my lap to settle back in.  I was content on an Island, in a car reading, while my husband practiced his craft on a nearby vessel, in a familiar harbor.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Bonus link to some celebrity perspectives on the meaning of happiness from the "This Emotional Life" website.

Home is where the neighborhood is

ArchitectureBoston just published an issue about neighborhood, which got me thinking. Sure it’s the twenty-first century, but our neighborhood is in an eighteenth century Salem condominium building. It’s a four-unit Georgian that was once an approximately 4,600 square-foot single-family home for a successful sea captain. Since the house is symmetrical with a center stair hall, it divided rather neatly into separate, eminently livable units in the ‘80s. My husband and I occupy one of the upper quadrants on the second and third floors. We share horse-hair plaster walls, wide-pine floors, twisting balusters and pride of place with our neighbors in the building.

Together we plan the building’s future, and, in the process, intertwine our destinies. We’ve orchestrated innumerable maintenance projects to repair or replace: the foundation sills, the siding, the trim, the roof, and the chimney, to name a few. At times, project planning and funding have become contentious as individual budgets tighten due to life events and fluctuating economies. Yet, over seven years of ad hoc condominium meetings, we’ve all managed to make accommodations for the better of the building, the group, and, thus, ourselves. We informally take turns bringing trash to the curb, cleaning the entry hall, tending to the garden, and looking after each other’s house plants or cats. We’ve even started sharing dinner get-togethers in which condominium business isn’t on the agenda. We’ve forged our own neighborhood of four households.

It’s a worthy model for how to create twenty-first century neighborhoods in general. Before considering other important building-to-building, building-to-open-space, or building-use to building-use relationships, we should focus on inter-building unit-to-unit relationships. Rehabbing, recycling, and re-apportioning space within existing housing stock is a green way to create affordable housing opportunities in which small groups of homeowners can benefit from old-house charm and individuality while shaping their own internal neighborhoods.

Even if older stock isn’t available for condominium conversion, new condominium buildings of well-crafted design, containing four unique units or less, can provide an affordable and desirable entrée to the housing market, while allowing each unit owner a meaningful ownership stake in the greater condominium.

Living in a somewhat quirky, four-unit condominium building is more like collaborating on the management of a large, single-family home than participating in the more unwieldy bureaucracy of a condo association comprised of ten or more cookie-cutter units. It’s high-density living that accommodates our natural affinity for shaping individualized space within a community.

Our condominium is but one internal neighborhood building block within our outer neighborhood of tightly sited, moderately-scaled, antique structures of mixed uses, ranging from other old-house condominiums to a homemade-ice-cream shop, a house museum, a tattoo parlor, and a National Park Service destination. All this is walking distance from the train station, Post Office, pocket parks, and waterfront. It’s a glorious, vibrant hodge-podge that works on the more macro level in part because it works first on the more micro level within buildings like ours.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Demise of shelter magazines

The regrettable loss of design democratizers

Since trouble in the housing market initiated our current economic slide, it’s no surprise that shelter magazines are among the latest casualties of the recession. House & Garden started the dismal parade when it folded in November 2007. Since then In Style Home, Blueprint, Home, Cottage Living, O at Home, Country Home, and Domino have closed their doors.

Historically, mainstream shelter magazines served a market hungry for design advice, but which often lacked the resources to retain architects. That’s a large readership when you consider that at least 95% of new homes in the U.S. don’t involve architects. The colorful, photo-rich pages of many shelter magazines were great design democratizers, offering tips and inspiration to do-it-yourselfers and those working directly with builders and designers (or even architects). Over time, T.V. and the internet stepped in to meet growing demand, providing different but often complementary material. Despite what eventually may have become an oversaturated category, it seems it was lack of advertising dollars, not lack of readership, which ultimately starved so many publications.

House & Garden had a readership of nearly one million at the end. Home reached a circulation of more than 800,000 in its final year. Cottage Living had a circulation in excess of one million. Country Home had over one-and-one quarter million last summer. Domino is estimated to have had 850,000. You get the picture. In a recent Washington Post article Deborah Burns, a senior V.P. at the Luxury Design Group (which includes Metropolitan Home and Elle Décor, two affluent brands) explains, “There’s no advertising to support the lower and middle markets in the shelter category, so revenue falls.” What a shame; those are the very markets with the most use for shelter magazines.

a lament for Cottage Living

It’s Cottage Living I will really miss. It was lively and accessible, promoting thoughtful placemaking and informal living in authentic, right-sized homes. Founding Executive Editor Lindsay Bierman was quoted on the Time Inc. website when he was made Editor in Chief (one month before Time Inc. announced the magazine's closing) saying, “Cottage Living is leading the way toward an new American Dream, a lifestyle defined by appreciation of quality over quantity, a pride of place, and living large while leaving a small footprint.” And so it was.

In September 2006, I had the good fortune to write for Cottage Living about one of the projects I designed, the Manchester Garage/Garden Room. I was impressed with how professional and thorough their staff and freelancers were. We had a ball at the photo shoot. I was honored to be part of their publication. Apparently, Cottageiving.com will also be closing, so I don’t know how long the link to my article there will work. Time Inc. will reportedly “keep the Cottage Living brand alive in one of its other leading shelter titles…” I’ll be interested to see how.

what next?

Where will all of the bereft readers of the now defunct shelter magazines go? Perhaps they’ll start frequenting design blogs. Stephen Drucker, editor of House Beautiful, says in the Washington Post “I think blogs are the best thing to happen in my 30 years in the industry…They spread the word about us. Blogs are basically magazines that are not financially viable.” Ouch. He continues, “Magazines that are currently in peril would probably be much better off as blogs.”

It’s time for a different online alternative to the failed or failing shelter magazines. It’s time for something more akin to the editorial structure of Design Observer and which builds on their economic model, but focuses on home design for a general audience. Or something with the posting frequency and approachability of Garden Rant, but for house enthusiasts. Hmmm. There’s an idea. Maybe House Enthusiast could become that alternative. Like Design Observer and Garden Rant, which are each produced by several contributing experts in their respective fields, House Enthusiast could evolve to include additional expert collaborators. I don’t know how much revenue Design Observer generates directly from their website, but they include rotating, unobtrusive, targeted advertising from the Ads Via The Deck network. House Enthusiast could likewise incorporate content-appropriate, judicious advertising. Maybe House Enthusiast could also secure additional revenue by offering subscriptions for select content, conducting educational seminars, providing limited services, or conceiving of other innovative income streams. Maybe this more robust and collaborative House Enthusiast 2.0 could better serve readers set adrift by Cottage Living and the like.

why not?

So with this post I’m making an open call for astute writers and thinkers to join me in promoting regional, vernacular-inspired architecture and design for today’s living. I welcome your financially viable ideas. Email Katie@katiehutchison.com.

by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast

The behavior economics of design

Choosing the best path despite ourselves

Two recent articles about the role of human nature in economic decision-making got my attention. The lessons of each could very easily be applied to the residential design process.

“The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors” by John Tierney in The New York Times (Feb. 26, 2008) expounds on our all-too-human desire to preserve our options and limit our exposure to perceived loss, despite the costs. The article references an MIT study conducted by Dr. Dan Ariely, professor of behavior economics, along with Jiwoong Shin, an economist now at Yale. In it students played a computer game that allotted them 100 computer clicks each. The game involved discovering which of three closed doors, when opened, would lead to maximum real cash rewards. To open a door a student could click on it. Each additional click on an open door earned a designated cash amount that varied from click to click. A student could switch between doors, but doing so expended a click without earnings and closed the door left behind. Tierney reveals that “the best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.” Those with a more stream-lined approach did better than those going back and forth.

This is the case in the design process as well. Clients, who are decisive when provided with a few well-considered design options, help architects to more readily tailor designs to suit them. A less decisive client will opt to pursue one path for a while, back track, and then opt for another path, only to back track again. The time and energy expended by trying to pursue too many different design directions can add up.

In the computer game, when a new feature was incorporated that started to reduce the size of doors that hadn’t been opened for a while, students dashed back to click them open so they wouldn’t disappear. Even when a fee was charged to reopen disappearing doors, the students opened them. This decreased their earnings even further. In another iteration of the game the students were given a means, without expense, to bring back closed doors that had disappeared, yet still students wasted clicks to keep doors from disappearing. Dr. Ariely, also author of Predictably Irrational, explains in the article that, “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss.”

We see this in the design process when clients unearth an alternative that they rejected long before. They want to revisit it, to reexamine why they rejected it, and re-determine if they made the proper decision the first time around. They hate to see an option disappear, even if they had previously found it lacking and even if revisiting it expends further energy and expense.

Architects can help prevent some of the pitfalls of such uncertainty. Part of an architect’s challenge is to explore many divergent design avenues early in the design process, weed out those that are clearly deficient, and present a client with two to three worthy potential schematic solutions, so there are fewer, better options to choose from in the first place. While sharing select options with a client, an architect can build a case for the design scheme that she believes has the greatest merit. A good architect will help steer a client in the right direction. This is a form of a “nudge.”

It pertains to the other article about behavior economics that intrigued me. In “When Shove Comes to Push” by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe, Bennett points out that, “The problem, as psychologists and economists are increasingly coming to agree, is that given total freedom of choice, people often fail to make the best decision for themselves.” He goes on to describe how social scientists are exploring the concept of “the ‘nudge’ – a model for how employers, friends, and even the government can structure people’s choices to push them in the right direction without restricting their freedom to go their own way.” One example of a “nudge” that he cites is when employers automatically enroll new hires in the company 401K plan. Employees have the freedom to opt out if they choose, but if they take no action, they start saving. Structuring the choice so saving is the default nudges employees to save.

According to Bennett, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About, Health, Wealth, and Happiness, call this type of structured nudging “choice architecture.” Bennett writes “Just as a well-designed building or a well-built tool can shape a person’s path or actions, a well-designed framework for making decisions, [Thaler and Sunstein] believe, can lead people to outcomes that will ultimately make them happier.”

Of course an architectural design nudge, like any other nudge, needn’t necessarily be heeded. This is why architects typically share more than one option, so clients can make their own decisions. We are all human after all. Still, architects can streamline clients’ residential design options and help nudge them toward the outcome likely to be in the clients' best interests.

by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast

Art Cognition

Rationalizing the intuitive

“Art for Our Sake” in last Sunday’s Boston Globe touches on one of my favorite subjects. Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland make the case for art education. The authors are researchers at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and they’re college educators elsewhere in Boston. They conducted a year-long study of five visual-arts classes taught at two schools in the Boston area: one public and one private. Their findings? Studying art fosters creative and critical thinking. Bravo. But isn’t that common sense? Well, apparently not.

For better or worse, often what we think we know intuitively requires rational evidence in order to convince others, and perhaps even ourselves, that our intuition is in fact sound. Rationalizing intuition and intuiting the rational is also at the crux of what architects do. We couldn’t do it without a sound background in the arts. I have often opined that everyone should go to art and architecture school. Short of that, I’ve made it my mission to share with you in these magazine postings some of what I learned there and how to apply those lessons to the built environment.

eight creative skills

According to the “Art for Our Sake” article, art education trains students to develop eight skills or “studio habits of the mind”. The first, and most obvious, is artistic craft. The others are: persistence, ability to communicate expression, recognition of the connection between schoolwork and the work of the world, observational acuity, capacity to envision, innovation through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation.

To my mind, these skills augment and reinforce similar skills typically developed via different means: through the study of words, in English class; numbers, in math class; and both words and numbers in science class. For that matter, sports, may be yet another register upon which to develop many of these “habits”. They are essential life lessons that often reach different people differently, depending in which medium they are more comfortable working. Most of us are not equally receptive to art, reading/writing, math, science, and sports. Even for those who are, discovering how a concept can be translated across disciplines only further clarifies its essence. I’ve found that an interdisciplinary approach in school and professional life makes for a richer experience in both.

rigorous process

For me, the study of art and architecture opens up new ways of seeing, illuminates new connections between ideas, and nourishes my need to understand. Until I enrolled in art and architecture school, I didn’t know what my thinking was missing. When I first started at the Rhode Island School of Design, I was an older student with a liberal arts background. I had achieved a certain facility with words as well as numbers, and was fairly undaunted by the prospect of taking on a new field of study.

Then after only a few weeks of immersion in my first architecture studio, my assumptions were challenged at every opportunity. Suddenly it was no longer clear what was up and what was down. My intuition proved unreliable. I was required to defend my designs. To rationalize them. Why was there a wall? Why did the building sit on the ground, not in it, not above it? What was the meaning of including the plan drawing on the page with the enlarged detail? Similar questions were asked in my life drawing class. Is the foot in the foreground really that small in relation to the rest of her body? Is that really where her ear is? Why is she floating in the corner of the page?

I was challenged to reconsider things I thought that I had long known. It was my most difficult academic undertaking to date. It was also the most rewarding. It introduced me to a rigorous process which I continue today, designing and analyzing three-dimensional form and two-dimensional visual expression, allowing each to inform the other and the way that I think. In years of study and practice I’ve created a visual foundation on which to build my aesthetic intuition, which has in turn allowed me to translate the aesthetically intuitive to the rational in order to design. (You might want to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to learn more about shaping intuition. “It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves,” he writes.)

never too late

For those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to have art and architecture education as part of your curriculum in school growing up or beyond, it’s never too late to start. If you’re in the New England area, I suggest that you participate in one or more of the continuing education opportunities, upcoming open studios, and/or film festivals, house and garden tours, and other special cultural events that are recommended here in House Enthusiast. If you’re outside the area, check with your local arts associations or museums for their suggestions. No matter your profession, you might be surprised by how an artistic discipline can sharpen your focus and enrich your life.

by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast