I define a good home as “A house where we feel strong connections with people and place.” It’s hard to get around the fact that if you are looking for strong connections with people and place, you will have to spend time with those people and in that place. In other words, if you are seldom at home, the chances of developing strong connections diminish.
“Being home” however, means more than just physically being in the house. The more your house is set up to to be a pleasant place to be, the greater the chance that connections are made. In that light it is of great importance to separate “Being in” spaces from the “going through” spaces.
In order to understand this critical issue, let’s start with a very simple house that we are all familiar with: A tipi. These simple lodges are entirely about “Being in”. Once you have entered, all you can do is sit down and face the other people in the circle. The person responsible for keeping the fire going usually sits by the door. Now suppose we feel a little cramped and we want to double our space by adding on another tipi. And let’s say we cut a door opposite the original door and add another tipi. Now, in order to get to the second tipi you have to walk through the first tipi; the original “Being in” space has also become a “going through” space. We can intuitively feel that the character of the original tipi has completely changed. Here is the thing we have to consider: It is awkward to “Go through” a “being in” place, but it is even worse to “be in” a place that is also used as a “going through” place. In other words, it is much harder to connect to people and place if people walk though your space all the time. Or even more simply: No one likes to sit in a hallway.
It may seem that I am just stating the obvious here, but apparently this concept is not very obvious if you look at our stock of modern houses. Often it is hard to find one single “Being in” place in a house. How can we tell? Quite easily: A “Being in” space is usually a dead-end space, with only one door or entrance (think tipi), while a going “through place” is a place with more than one door or entrance. It turns out that most rooms in most newer houses have more than one door or entrance.
It is important to note that it does not matter whether those doors are being used or not: Our ability to feel present in a place is directly influenced by how we perceive the possibility that someone would or could walk through our space. That perception is formed by what we observe in the space around us; even if we had a room with a bunch of doors to nowhere (if you were to open them all you would see would be the wall), it would still feel like a “going through” place. Even people who are alone most of the time should respect this phenomenon in their house: Even if you are absolutely certain that no one will ever pass through, a room with 2 doors still feels like a hallway.
Consider a bathroom. If there is one time when you would not want people to walk through your space, it’s while you are sitting down with your pants down. Even if you knew both doors were locked, your perception of safety would be greater in a bathroom with one door. Friends of mine have it even worse. Not only are there 2 doors in the bathroom, they also have no locks. To top it off, the shower stall is made of regular glass and faces one of the doors.
Now imagine you are sitting on a couch in a living room. There is a door behind you and a door in front of you. You are now essentially sitting in a hallway, because if someone would want to enter the living room from one door and leave through the other door, the couch you are sitting in is in the way of the shortest route. We naturally want to go the shortest route so now you are nothing less but an obstacle to be dealt with. That is certainly not very conducive to your desire to connect with people and place.
Or, let us visit the kitchen. As I am walking toward the coffee maker I suddenly bump into one of the more recent trends in kitchen design: The island. As handy it is to have all that extra counter space, the 3 foot space all around the island has become a “Going through” space. You are now cooking, cutting, serving, dealing with hot items, opening refrigerators and ovens, all in the middle of a walkway.
It is not uncommon to see family rooms with 4 or 5 entrances, which allows for what I have heard architects refer to as “Circulation”. Unfortunately, that is all these rooms become: A series of undefined pathways that makes it hard to do anything in those room that would help you to concentrate, have a conversation, make music or read, connect to people and place. At the same time, when you ask people what their favorite place in the house is, they often mention the one room or spot that is a dead end.
So how do we avoid “Going through” spaces that are meant for “being in”? One solution is a hallway. They are the simplest way to seperate “Being in” places from “going through” places. But hallways have their own set of problems. They are often windowless and therefore gloomy and unpleasant, especially if they are narrow. They are also expensive. Each square foot needs to be built maintained, heated and cooled. I have visited custom designed houses that were so poorly designed that they had as much as 60% of their surface area dedicated to hallways and “Going through” places. At 2 or 3 hundred dollars per square foot (for construction costs), that really adds up.
In the process of ridding ourselves of the gloomy hallways, designers have embraced the “Open floor plan” and in the process often forgot to consider the “Going through” spaces. As houses have increased in size, there needs to be a lot of “Going through” spaces to get to all the rooms and in the “open floor plan” that usually means walking through different rooms. That is how we ended up with so many houses full of “Circulation”, but with no place “to be”.
So what can we do with this information? If you are building (or dreaming of building) a new house, you should identify every space as either a “Being in” place or a “going through” place. If the places where you had hoped to connect, be at peace, be one, concentrate, create, however you want to fill that in, turn out to be “going through” places, you will have to go back to the drawing board. It truly is as simple as that.
Most of us have to deal with the house we have. However, solving these problems in existing houses does not have to be difficult. Of course the knee jerk response, and not always a bad one, would be to create more dead-end spaces in your house by closing off doors. You can try this out by hanging a nice cloth over on both sides of the door you are thinking of closing off and see how you like it. In some cases this may compromise the traffic too much; it gets too hard to reach certain spaces. Sometimes people have, as a function of “uniformity” or “simplicity” regular doors on spaces that are actually closets. It would be wise to change those doors that look like closet doors, even if it is a walk-in closet. A simple way of doing this is by splitting a 3 foot door vertically into two smaller doors that either swing or just open out.
There are other ways to create dead-end “Being in” spaces. Although few of us really think about office cubicles with nostalgia, that is exactly how office buildings provide places for people to “Be” (productive). I am not advocating turning your house into an office space, but the creative use of half-walls, or “Pony walls,” can help you separate the “going through” from the “being in”. The great advantage of a pony wall is that you create more comfortable spaces to be in, without changing the perception of size of the room that you are in. The setting can become more intimate without feeling cramped. The pony walls can be very thin and even transparent in the form of cloth on a light wooden frame, or planters. Standard drywall on a 2×2 frame would work fine but may be a missed opportunity to give some character to a space. This would be a great opportunity to build a small cob wall in your house! You could also consider bamboo, reed mats, aquariums, red brick or rustic stone. If you have a walkway behind a seat, table or couch, simply raise a small wall behind it and you’ll be amazed by the improvement.