Working with an Architect

As the holidays quickly approach, the hubbub of preparation for impending festivities and celebrations goes into high gear. Holiday open houses, hosted in shops, offices and homes, speak to the sense of hospitality that accompanies the season.  

I’ve been thinking about this hospitality lately, especially in light of a recent three-day workshop I attended in Chattanooga. Sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders and taught by Steve Hoffacker, the workshop was focused on Aging in Place and how we can make our homes more livable for longer.  One of the concepts presented in the workshop was the “visitable” home.  Aging in Place design has several design categories, each focusing on different priorities, including Universal Design, Adaptable Design, Accessible Design, Visitable Design, and Livable Design.  And while the technical recommendations associated with each category varied, the simplicity of the term “visitable” home particularly appealed to my southern sense of hospitality. 

How do we design and renovate homes so that everyone feels welcome, and not just during the holidays? This isn’t always an easy task: technically, the visitable home requires accessible paths into the home, meaning on-grade entrances, ramps or some sort of mechanical lift. Those aren’t always design features that appeal to homeowners and may not be feasible given lot or site constraints. However, we can work to provide clear paths to public spaces, so that our guests who use wheelchairs or walkers can navigate the party with ease, or that there are powder room facilities available to everyone, especially those who might have a hard time navigating the one tucked under the stair. We can think about how someone might approach the front door from the sidewalk and whether there is sufficient lighting for the dark afternoons of the holidays to illuminate a clear path. In some ways I think about these considerations not as obstacles, but just an expression of good manners. Hospitality is important.

What does the word “open house” mean to you? How can we help you design your renovation or new home so that it supports the hospitality you want to extend? 

When we were in Italy this past summer, we worked with Context Travel for our day at the Vatican Museums.   Being vaguely familiar with the crowds made me a little nervous about negotiating the vast museum complex with the kids, and I wanted to make sure they saw the things they needed to see, as well as some of the more obscure things that might pique their interest.  Our guide, Valeria, met us at the entrance, and once past security and ticketing, air-kissed and waved us on to little used elevators and through roped off passageways at a quick clip, offering glorious tidbits of information along the way.  Theoretically, if we had done our research, we might have managed the crowd aspect of the visit, but Valeria offered something we couldn’t have come up with on our own: an alternate route discerned through experience and ingenuity.  We started with the Papal Carriages, a less visited and air-conditioned exhibit that served as a framework for understanding what we were about to see, a quiet place away from the crowds where we could ask questions and listen to the answers, and a starting point that was not overwhelming for the kids.  In short order, it was clear we were in the hands of an expert guide, and I was so grateful for her experience and wisdom.

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A little bit of history first. I did not attend an undergraduate architecture program. I made my decision to go to architecture school during my junior year, after I had already committed to an art history major (although I ended up concentrating in architectural history in that department.) I spent a good deal of my education writing papers, culminating in a 125 page thesis on Harvey Wiley Corbett, a little known architect working in New York in the early part of the twentieth century. My writing was about conveying information and ideas in a clear, concise manner.

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