I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with houses. I love everything about them – I love to know their architecture, their era, whether the windows are transom or bay. I like to know if the roofline is gabled or ranch, if the garage was pre-1950s or post. I like porches. I like fads: I like formal living rooms that eventually gave way to “great rooms” that then went back to formal living rooms, and the fact that porches gave way to back yards in the middle of the century. I took an architecture/urban-planning course in my senior year in college, and it was one of those courses that makes you think your life could’ve taken a very different direction if you’d heard about it soon enough. …
Anyway, I like home architecture, but I also like what’s inside. I like the story of the house. I like houses that look lived in, not like pages out of a magazine. I like homes that have messy bookcases – filled with well-loved books and maps and maybe some postcards tucked in. I like frames on the walls – framed photos, framed T-shirts, framed posters, framed bookmark collections – I don’t care what’s in the frame, I just love to see what a person chooses out of his or her past to put up on a wall and remember. Continue reading