Sight Lines

I was thinking about houses a little bit ago. We went out for a walk while some brownies baked (they're cooling now, and I promised my daughter that I would not touch them until she got a chance to have one tomorrow morning); while we walked, we talked about house design. We're continuing to kick around ideas about what makes a good house -- what we like about what we have now, and what we'd improve.

One of the Not So Very Big House (which I think ought to be called Not As Big A House As You Thought It Would End Up Being, but NABAHAYTIWEUB doesn't trip lightly off the tongue) concepts is that of sight lines. The idea is that if you want a space to feel cozy, border it with things that restrict your view -- walls, most notably, but also partitions, hanging tapestries, and the like. If you want the space to feel big, open it -- use half walls instead of full ones, put windows at the end of a vision run so that you see what's beyond, and that additional area becomes part of the 'sense' of the area's size. The concept sounds right to me, but I'm coming to think that its only a rule of thumb -- if you don't have a concept you want to implement, then here's a good one to keep in mind. But its not the only one.

Years ago I read a description of how the interior of ballistic missile submarines is laid out. The article said that in some places it was feasible to create a straight run of decking, but the designers intentionally broke up the run with one step up, one down, or zig zag around a pillar, because they felt that when you couldn't see all the way to where you were going, you still had a sense of a 'travel' and 'movement'. Something like traveling a given distance in the Rockies and the same distance in Kansas -- there's less sense of movement in Kansas because there's less to judge it by.

One of the house designs we like for the possible house is a roughly U shape, inverted, with the bedrooms along the right side, a center corridor terminating in a central fireplace, beyond which is a large living room, and along the left, a garage, utility room, and nook. The dining room is along the central corridor, on the left, and the kitchen is to the left of the living space, connecting the living room with the nook. I like it because it incorporates the idea of movement -- you can't see all of the rooms from one place -- but it wasn't until I was thinking about it as we walked tonight that I realized it didn't have much of a sightline. And that, therefore, a design didn't have to incorporate a rule of thumb if you had a good reason for ignoring it.

If and when we do build, we're going to see if we can have a virtual reality version of the house constructed so that we can 'walk' through it before the first board is nailed. Don't know if thats possible for less than multibucks, but I like the idea. I totally do not know how to communicate the level of quality that we would want in the house, though. We aren't looking for posh -- we'd be looking for good. The best description I've come across is 'like houses used to be built'. But how do you illustrate that to a skeptical builder? The best we can do, thus far, is details and descriptions -- thick doors, not hollow, for example; openable clerestory windows to contribute to natural air circulation, and so forth. Those are good, but they give only a passing sense of how the house should feel. . I thought of a comment I read years ago about how designers in Detroit would spend hours and days making the 'thunk' of a slammed car door sound right, because that was how most people judged the quality of the car. (And still do, probably - though I'm tickled each time I see some of those Vehix commercials -- the oriental woman asking to see it in a different color, the woman bobbing up and down in the second row, peering intently at the car's interior as she rotates. Priceless. )

Quality.. How do I 'thunk' the house before its even built?