HOME
… the ideal home is one where the front door is used by but one family, where the house faces upon a through street, where water-closet accommodation is provided, and where there are as many rooms allotted to a family as there are persons composing.
– Herbert Ames, The City Below the Hill, 1897, quoted by Raphaël Fischler in “Choices made nearly a century ago explain today’s housing crisis”
A private home is probably the quirkiest and the most intense of all architectural design exercises. You’re dealing with real people, getting to know as much about them as they’re willing to share, and sometimes more. The goal is to provide a refuge for a small close-knit group of individuals that will best reflect the way they live their lives now and in the future. There is a degree of symbiosis involved. The occupants, satisfied with their domestic environment at first, will slowly modify it to suit their changing needs and desires. Meanwhile, the architectural environment will, over time, exercise its own subtle effect on the behaviour and identity of the occupants. A house and its occupants represent an intimate collaborative venture that may last a lifetime, or several lifetimes.
It's inevitable that the idea of financial investment will enter the picture. Whether long-term or short-term, a private home is an investment. Long-term: It’s a hedge against the poor house, a potential windfall and a possible posthumous benefit for your children. In the meantime, it will give you years of enjoyment. Short-term: It’s an asset like any other, intended to build wealth. In this case, it’s best not to get too attached to your home (or homes). After all, it’s only a waystation. And, except for the photos and furnishings, it’s not to be taken personally.
The impersonal aspect of housing applies especially to dwelling units in larger developments (apartments, condos and co-ops), or as part of an ownership pool (timeshares—according to recent statistics, these are growing in popularity), or “investment properties,” including short-term occupancies like Airbnb, Vrbo and others.
In every case, whether you own it, rent it, or simply crash in it, your home is still your personal space. Regardless of how big it is, or how transient your occupancy, you have some expectation of privacy, security, comfort and protection from the elements.
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We are acutely aware that “home” means very different things to different people: a haven; a family heirloom; an advertisement of taste and social status; a prop or an accessory to a lavish lifestyle; a wise investment. But to millions of others around the world, a permanent home is an abstract concept, an aspiration that they have no hope of ever realizing.
When we talk about “home,” we aren’t just talking about one thing, or even one idea of a thing. Two recent events brought this distinction home to me. The first was a news item I found online, reporting that Hong Kong is poised to pass a law to ban subdivided apartments smaller than eight m2 (86 ft2). Note: Your North American kitchen is probably bigger than that. Meanwhile, “coffin homes”—tiny spaces barely larger than a single bed, also known as “cage homes”—will be unaffected, since they are already regulated by the Bedspaces Apartments Ordinance. These minuscule dwellings don’t represent expressions of personal taste or real estate investments, and they barely qualify as a roof over one’s head. But they are homes.
As a reminder of the other end of the scale, at the ADFF film festival sponsored by the Toronto Society of Architects, I viewed two documentaries about large, lavish California homes—one 743 m² (8,000 ft²), the other 1300 m2 (14,000 ft2)—that introduced me to a third possibility, beyond comfort and economics: the house as an architectural experience—a work of art.
The first film, The House: 6 Points of Departure, examines the Crawford house designed by Pritzker winner Thom Mayne. The second film, This is Not a House, features the Hill House in Montecito by Mayne’s protégé Robin Donaldson. In essence, the houses are not conceived as purely personal spaces, or as real estate investments, although they are surely both. Rather, the houses represent architectural ideas about form and space that have been realized in elaborate, imaginative and, without doubt, extremely expensive ways.
The houses conform to the landscapes they sit within, as well as the inhabitants’ (second generation, in the case of the Crawford House) personalities and lifestyles, which are enhanced, enriched, and certainly moulded by the architecture. It is apparent that a work of domestic architecture can influence its occupants to the same degree that the occupants can influence the architecture. But the most extraordinary achievement in these houses is that the architects’ ideas are so palpably evident. Whether you like the work, or the idea that architecture should exist as a work of art—architecture for architecture’s sake—you can’t help but see that in the hands of a master, domestic architecture can be truly inspiring.
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Having a home doesn’t mean owning a home. Having a roof over one’s head doesn’t necessarily involve a real estate investment. But current conditions make the distinction acutely important. On the one hand, there’s the North American capitalist dream (often regarded as an expectation) that everyone should be able to buy a home. On the other hand, there is the socialist ideal (sometimes referred to as a basic right) that everyone deserves to have a roof over their head, whether purchased or rented, and subsidized if necessary.
And then there’s reality.
Day after day, we are presented with images of entire families whose homes, even their entire neighbourhoods, have been eradicated, who are lucky to have a makeshift tent in a refugee camp to contain their few remaining possessions; families setting out in overcrowded dinghies, slogging through jungles towards inhospitable destinations, in the hope of finding a new home; families left homeless due to floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other vengeful acts of a climate too long ignored. How can we think about what a home means without considering what it means not to have a home?
This is the bigger question, for architects, as well as financiers, politicians, and other well-intentioned people. We all need somewhere to call home. It may be an investment, and hopefully, a wise one, but if residential property investment means ignoring everything else that affects our lives and contributes to the very conditions that make it difficult or impossible for people to have something resembling a home, then the discussion can only be considered incomplete.
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
– Author Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose.