More great photography from Jennifer Squires

In September, I wrote a profile of the work of photographer Jennifer Squires. Well, since that posting appeared, Jennifer took a vacation in Greece and her resulting photography has me aching for the Mediterranean. Check out some highlights.

Ahhh. Gorgeous stuff Jennifer. Jennifer's photography is available for sale in her shop on the great website Etsy. Prints of her photos are available in many sizes and I can see a collection of these images gracing the walls of a guest bath or enhancing an entryway. Jennifer has a way of noticing things, of exalting the every day and her perspective is certainly welcome in my home. Drop in and look it over. There's an escapist and ethereal quality to her photographs that I can't get enough of. I feel as if I'm floating over her subjects, whether the subject is a Greek hill town or a peony. You can see even more of her work on her website here. Keep it up Jennifer!

Sarah Susanka has a new book

Sarah Susanka has a new book coming out in mid-February, Not So Big Remodeling. You can pre-order it on Amazon in anticipation of its release. I cannot wait to get my hands on it. To make it easier, my pals at Amazon have a link right here.

Sarah Susanka is an architect and accidental lifestyle guru and it started with the 1998 release of her book The Not So Big House. 

Susanka's work isn't how-to and the homes and design concepts she discusses are not something most people can do themselves. What she advocates however, is a philosophy that calls to me like the Sirens called to Odysseus. I am powerless to resist her ideas, utterly powerless. Unlike the Sirens in the Odyssey though, Susanka's not calling me to a bad end. Rather, her work is a wake up call and a challenge to me and every other creative professional out there to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of why we do what we do. I mean, at the end of the day, my job is to help people live more efficiently. 

Efficiency for me means that the people who call on me come away from the experience with a home that better reflects who they are. They get a kitchen, a bathroom, or a whole home that that not only reflects how they live now but will help them live better as their lives progress. It's my job to come up with ideas that enable families (by any definition) to come together, to live peacefully, to grow, to celebrate, to be quiet. It's my job to provide people with a place where they belong. I can think of no better way to spend my days.

I work primarily in renovation. So more often than not, I'm handed some builder's idea of what the Good Life is:

Ugh. Well, that photo's an exaggeration, they're never quite as bad as that. I mean look at that thing. It's a garage with a house attached. 

Anyhow, the philosophy of home that Sarah Susanka espouses is the absolute opposite of the photo above. Her take on home building; and with her new book, home remodeling; is that people should build better and not build bigger. A home should be built for the benefit of its inhabitants and not for the benefit of its neighbors. Comfort, detail and space should trump square feet. Empty, soulless square feet beget empty, soulless people. She doesn't come out and say that, but I won't hesitate to. But what she does come right out an say is that somewhere along the path to the typical 4,000 square foot new American home, something vital's been lost. Vaulted ceilings for the sake of vaulted ceilings don't make for a happy home. Sterile, impossible to furnish, so-called gathering rooms aren't a place where people will want to gather if their sole attribute is being huge for the sake of being huge. More isn't better, it's just more.

Susanka wants not only architects, designers and builders to start thinking and working toward quality over quantity, she wants the general public to start demanding it. I invoke her name on a very regular basis and I owe a lot of whatever success I've enjoyed to her. I didn't need The Not So Big House to point me in a direction or to awaken something in me. Her book landed in some fertile soil when I got my hands on it way back when, let me tell you. But what her books did and continue to do is help me realize that I'm not alone in thinking the things that I do about home. Susanka's success has brought me some really great clients over the years, people primed and ready to go, excited at the prospect of living Not So Big. So Sarah, even though I've never met you, thanks and congrats on your new book.

Hey! I found a great furniture store in Saint Pete

One of my current jobs consists of gutting and renovating a mid-century marvel in Saint Pete. I've mentioned the job before, it's the one that involves all of the Carrera marble and dark, dark cabinetry. Anyhow, part of this renovation involved opening up a rather odd great room in the center of the house. It's odd in that it's about 25' x 18' and it has really wide doorways into it on three sides and a nearly full-length window on the fourth side. It's about as open as an open floor plan can get.

I'm pretty good at coming up with furniture and space plans, but how to turn this great room into a combination media room, living room and reading room while at the same time keeping the traffic patterns open through the middle of the room has eluded me.

Enter the amazing David King of Doma Home Furnishings in Saint Pete. David worked on the space planning for another one of my whole-house re-dos a couple of months ago and the clients who hired him can't stop talking about him. David's first store is on 22nd Avenue, North in Saint Pete and he recently opened a second location in South Tampa. All of the particulars about their locations and hours are on their website, Doma Home Furnishings.

Finding decent, reasonable and appropriately scaled furniture in our market can be a real character builder for some reason. I get tired of saying "Ya hafta go to Miami for that," and now that David King and Doma are a growing presence in this market, I don't have to any more.  So if you're in the market for some interesting home furnishings or if you just want to see what's out there as you plan a future purchase, stop in to see David and the rest of the gang at Doma.

In the words of our new president-elect

I love election day

I voted today and so I get to sport my I voted sticker all day long. I may even get a free cup of coffee at Starbucks this afternoon. You know they're giving free coffee to anybody with a sticker today, right? Anyhow, voting on election day always gives me a thrill. There's something so gosh darn American about it and the ritual reinforces in me my love of country and it makes me think about our place in history. We're fortunate in countless ways. 

As I was standing in line this morning I was thinking about this ritual of democracy and how glad I was to be standing in that line. Call me a fool, but the whole experience always makes me feel glad to be a part of things.

Hank Steuver wrote a piece in today's Washington Post on this very topic and I really like what he had to say. So here it is in its entirety.

The Prized Token of Sticking Together on Election Day
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Since we're probably standing in a rather long line right now, let us take a moment to praise something as simple as wearing one's little "I Voted" sticker all day long, and wearing it today-- even if, to some people, the sticker says sucker.

Please note that the sticker doesn't say "I AlreadyVoted." (Though there's a market for those. About 30 million Americans, one-quarter of all voters, already have voted.) The sticker doesn't say "First!"

It says you stood in a school cafeteria or a branch library or a community center gymnasium this morning or this afternoon, or you'll stand there tonight after work, and it says that you stood there because you thought of yourself as no less noble (and no more important) than anyone else. These days, that's huge. You voiced your opinion while also remaining part of a "we." You took your turn. It's the opposite of "The Amazing Race." It's the amazing wait.

Granted, there are all sorts of legitimate reasons to vote early, up to and including rampant hipsterism or the paranoid feeling that your vote could get lost in a crowd. Voting early may be all the rage, but it's a little like having a black smear on your forehead on Ash Tuesday. Does it get you that much closer to heaven?

 There was this video that popped up the other day, from a get-out-the-vote group in California called Why Tuesday?, which shows a dude named Jacob Soboroff (the founder of Why Tuesday?) and actress Kirsten Dunst, and their little trip to the Los Angeles County clerk's office to vote early. They are smug and way, way ahead. It was days ago --Oct. 20. They made it seem like a date. "You guys should go vote," he says. "Or volunteer," she says.

Is voting early like waiting all night to make sure you get the first of the new iPhones? Did it make you feel more American? Is it like those kids from the Ron Clark Academy, dancing and singing about "you can vote however you like"?

Because in many states, you can! Have it your way! The customer is always right, and the customer is always you.

You sure have gotten a lot of exposure lately. You are Joe the Plumber. You and your family. You, you, you and no one else. You and your social networks online. You've grown accustomed to setting your own preferences. You want everything now.

"We" is so lost. We click on our faves and disregard the rest. We don't see movies together anymore in the dark at appointed times. We don't watch TV shows when they originally air; we watch them when we want. We don't watch or read the same news the same way. We don't sing the same Top 40. We don't even watch the Super Bowl together anymore. We pause it and let it flow forth in real time so that you can watch it several minutes behind, apart, because you don't like ads.

Today, what's left of We stands in line for what may be the last true Election Day. By 2012 and 2016, there will probably be an Election Window, like the enrollment period for company health plans. U cn txt ur vote to the # on the scrn.

For now, the "I Voted" sticker remains gloriously the same. Oh, some jurisdictions may dress it up --Prince William's [county] sticker is much jazzier than the District's simple white circle with the red "X" in the box -- but the message is clearer than ever: I kick it old school. I waited in line with everyone else on the appointed day, because "everyone" is the whole idea. The "I Voted" sticker has been around a long time, at least five election cycles. (A Florida manufacturer claims to have been making "the original" version since 1986, but it probably goes back further.)

The District of Columbia Voter's Guide showed up several days ago in our mail, and on the front cover was a cartoon of a ballot and a pencil holding hands and jumping happily. There was something rudimentary and childlike, almost Hello Kitty about them. It made it feel like social studies class. It's dorky cool, more cool than watching Kirsten Dunst vote early. "You complete us," read the cute words beneath the Pencil and the Ballot, in a retro '70s-style italic. What followed was 57 sober pages of instructions, rules, sample ballots, statements from candidates and long lists of potential advisory neighborhood commissioners.

There's so much to love about the standing part today, amid all the drab beige, taking in the smell of someone else's coffee, rereading the entire newspaper, stuck in the line of voters that doesn't seem to move but, in fact, does. Then comes the sticker.

What a wonderful and boring thing, voting together.