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Enlarge Image Image Gallery Illustration by David Barrett

I grew up in a bunch of rent houses. They came in all sizes and shapes, but were uniformly well-used. Sometimes we kids shared bedrooms, sometimes we each had our own. Sometimes space was so tight that the refrigerator would be relegated to the back porch, or the good china kept under a bed. It’s amazing to me, looking back, how my mother could pack up on a moment’s notice, move to a new house sight unseen, and make it feel like home. I’m not, as a result of these peregrinations, particularly house-proud.

This house that Thomas and I have lived in for most of our married life, have raised our kids and pets and random small livestock in and around, is pretty casual. There’s little logic to the storage (camera equipment in the same cupboard as mason jars, correspondence files in the coat closet). We’ve added rooms here and there as needs have arisen, and visitors sometimes mistake our living room for an enclosed porch or vice versa. Our efforts at making this old bungalow environmentally sound have been extensive but random. The palette is basically “earth,” designed to match what gets tracked in. But it works, and it’s been home for a lot of years.

The new house we hope to move into a year from now, that’s another story. We’re making conscious decisions! We’re planning down to the square foot, even the inch! A place for everything! If we had tried to undertake this massive project by ourselves, we feared we would kill each other, or at least yell a lot. So we’re working with an architect. And the process has been revealing and rewarding on many levels.

We were wary in the beginning. We’re both pretty opinionated and are die-hard do-it-yourselfers. We worried that a house designed by someone else would somehow be less than “ours.” (I secretly worried that we would drive an architect mad.) What we’ve found is a design team that’s the next best thing to couple counseling, and a house plan that’s different from and better than anything I would have imagined.