Reader question: What never goes out of style?

Help! My husband and I are about to renovate our kitchen and I want to know what never goes out of style before we start spending money on this project. What style, in wood type and color never goes out of style?

Hmmm. I hear this question a lot and I'm going to answer it by not answering it. At least not yet. First, let's start by taking a stroll through some kitchen designs of the last 100 years. This is by no means an exhaustive survey of every kitchen style that's come and gone in that time period, but it will help me make my point so bear with me.

Here's a kitchen from 1921.

Here's one from 1931.

Here's 1941

1951

1961

Here's 1971

And 1981

Here's a kitchen from 1991

2001 already looks pretty dated already

And here's what's being billed as a traditional style right now.

As you can see, the words timeless and kitchen don't belong in the same sentence. Even the last photo, the "traditional" one, is pure trend. That layout, those appliances, that cabinetry... it's all very right now. It may take a page from some past styles, but in the era it's invoking (1910-1920), a kitchen looked nothing like that.

Contemporary kitchen design is new, regardless of the style of the room. The idea of a kitchen being the center of activity in a home was unheard of until 30 years ago. Pretend for a moment that it's 1955 and you're talking to your grandmother. Imagine her reaction to the news that you're planning to spend the equivalent of half your annual income on a kitchen renovation that will become the focal point of your home. She'd think you'd lost your mind and then she'd tell you to get out of the way so that she could get back to boiling the pot of diapers she'd been working on all morning.

Kitchen designs change because our culture changes, and it's not just a function of trends in taste. Social changes, technological changes, economic changes, etc., evolve and reinforce each other over time. You'd hate an authentically period kitchen because you don't live the way people lived 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. How things look is inextricably linked to how things work.

I say that there's no real answer to your question. Renovation and construction always look like the time when they were built or renovated. The minute you start swinging a hammer is the same moment that time stops and how you live right now gets preserved for all time. Or for as long as whatever you're building lasts. So even though I say that there's no answer to your question, here's some advice as you go about deciding how to spend your money. 

The first being that quality doesn't go out of style. Well-made cabinetry and appliances that are made to last will get you more years of use and satisfaction than cheap stuff will. In it for the long haul? Stay out of big box stores and get ready to spend some money.

Second, I'd advise you to avoid specialty finishes on your cabinetry. That means anything with a glaze, a distressed paint or anything intended to give new cabinetry or furniture instant character. Character has to be earned and that's as true of your cabinetry and furniture as it is about your personality. Short cuts to character don't work. 

Third, avoid adding colors that are right now to things you can't change easily. A good case in point is the light blue and brown color palettes that are still all over the place. Getting light blue appliances, a finish color available from Dacor right now, might look good for now but five years from now you will hate them. If you love that blue and brown palette, get blue and brown throw rugs, not appliances. A blue throw rug costs $20 a blue fridge $3000 to $4000. You tell me, which would you rather replace in a couple of years? So the lesson here is to accessorize with trendy colors, don't build them in.

Finally, do some research on where kitchen design has been and where the experts think it's headed. You cannot anticipate what's next with any degree of certainty, but you can take steps from getting yourself locked in the past too tightly. The idea that the kitchen is the center of a home in 2009 is not something that's going away any time soon. But this Old World style that can't go away fast enough is a recipe for heartache later. Where to turn for guidance you ask? Hire a professional kitchen designer to help you realize your dream. Explain very clearly to him or her what you want to do and have this designer be standing in your home while you do this explaining. Think this through and have a detailed plan before you start writing checks and you'll be a lot happier in 10 years than you would be otherwise. Whatever you end up with, be sure that it reflects your life, your hopes, your needs and your wants.

New SketchUp guide for everybody

Wanna learn how to do this?

With real and powerful software that's also free?

Imagine what you can do with this!

Of course, these are Google SketchUp models and they're from a master user by the name of Surya Murali. Murali writes a blog, My World in Three Dimensions, and it's an interesting read if only to see what's possible with this amazing software.

For the rest of us, there's a new version Of Google SketchUp for Dummies and it's been updated to take advantage of all of the new features in Google SketchUp 7. The book will walk you through all of the capabilities of Google SketchUp 7 Free and Google SketchUp 7 Pro.

I used SketchUp 7 for a client presentation last week and I think I got the job. The positive response I heard was due to SketchUp 7's uncanny ability to let me preview a completed project with amazing realism. The mosaic tile in my model was the actual mosaic tile I'm specifying. The lighting fixtures were the exact Tech Lighting fixtures I'm planning to use, the floor was the actual travertine floor, the wall colors were Sherwin-Williams and the appliances were the KitchenAid models my clients have already bought. After years of pointing at my renderings and saying "let's pretend that silver rectangle over there is your fridge," it's an amazing thing to have a client look at a rendering and say "Hey! That's my fridge!"

Feeling left out of this? Don't. Download Google SketchUp 7 then Buy this book.

Thanks Tampa Bay Business Journal

Photo credit: Kathleen Cabble

So get this, yesterday's Tampa Bay Business Journal ran a profile of the design studio where I hang my shingle. Here's the link to the article. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing but the few paragraphs you can read for free end with a pithy quote from me.

Pithy is hardly what I'd call it, but it gets better in the parts you can't see, trust me.

So aside from featuring a not-so-flattering photo of me and Carl, it was great to see an upbeat report about the business-y side of the place why I ply my trade.

That article came about without any effort on our part, and it was really satisfying to have been sought out by a business publication. In spite of what's going on in the market surrounding us, we do run a pretty tight ship and we are in this for the long haul. You know, there are times when I wonder how I'm going to make it through this downturn and if I let myself run with that thought it leads me to a really unhappy place. Staying optimistic and engaged in right now doesn't usually require as much effort as it has these last few months. This article in the TBBJ gives me a lot of hope and makes that task a bit easier. Thanks.

A conversation with Sarah Susanka

I had a great telephone conversation with Sarah Susanka yesterday. I've been writing about the new book she wrote with Marc Vasallo, Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live, quite a bit these last few weeks, and I finished up that phone call even more convinced that Susanka's onto something important.

Susanka grew up in England, in a village in Kent. At the age of 14 her family moved to Los Angeles and the resulting culture shock planted the seed that would become The Not So Big House years later. The years passed, she went to school and became an architect. She soon found herself as an architect with a bustling practice. After 15 years of that, she realized that she had something to say and she started to write.

Separating Susanka from the ideas she gets across in her books isn't possible and to point that out, when she realized that she wanted to write she found herself with a schedule so full that at first she thought she didn't have time. Never one to accept excuses, she made time for herself the only way she knew how. She scheduled herself onto her own calendar. Instead of seeing clients at the appointed hour, she set aside the time for herself to write. In treating her Sarah's Writing Time with the same gravity she'd treat an appointment with a client, she wrote without a specific goal in mind, but what that scheduled writing time yielded evolved into 1998's best seller The Not So Big House.

In her latest book, Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live she touches on this theme again in the chapter 17, A Place of Your Own. Setting aside A Place Of Your Own, or Poyo in a living space makes practices like writing or meditating more possible than they would be otherwise. The ideas she espouses, like the Poyo, are not about square feet or size. Instead, they are about intention and scale. Human beings are social animals, that's abundantly clear. But people need a place to retreat and think just as much as they need to be surrounded by the others who share their lives. Why not create yourself a nook in which to be quiet when you're planning a space? Why not indeed? And why does this sound so revolutionary when someone does?

I asked her where she thinks the current housing market situation will lead us as a culture. She answered that she "suspects that the situation today will affect us for the next few decades. That effect is bigger than the housing market, and people are beginning to consider what matters. Instead of focusing on the next best thing or house, people are beginning to look at what they already have. There's a regrouping going on as people begin to see their homes not so much as an asset to be traded, but rather a place to settle. As people see their homes as a place to live more than as an investment, priorities will begin to change." She sees a lot more remodeling happening and she sees builders beginning to build smaller and better-designed homes. "There will be less emphasis on square feet and more emphasis on quality," she predicts.

And for people currently stuck in poorly-designed and scaled homes built during the boom years, she offers a salve in the form of chapter 20, Too Bigness. Vaulted ceilings and wide open floor plans sound great as ideas, but as executions they are notoriously wanting. Chapter 20 is a terrific primer in space planning for these too large proportions and it's brimming with ideas that will help anybody wrestle some of these unwieldy floor plans back into something resembling a human scale. 

But chapter 20, like that chapters in all of her books, isn't about instruction. The Not So Big books aren't how to manuals and that's the root of their appeal to me. Sarah Susanka is a visionary and her books lay out a philosophy of home. These books are bigger than square feet or vaulted ceilings. They take a step back and take a meta view of what the nature of a home is. The chapters and exercises in her books are there to get you thinking. "I'm an interpreter and not a creator" she used to tell her clients and there's a lot of that sentiment that comes through in her work today.

The only people who really matter when it comes to how to use a space are the people who live in it. It's my job as a designer to listen to those people and guide them to a place where their lives are enhanced, where they can feel truly comfortable and at home. A home is the background for the main act, life. All too often, those roles get reversed and I for one take great comfort that someone like Sarah Susanka is saying things like this in the public square. A house is about who lives in it, it's not about Jonathan Adler or Kelly Wearstler or Todd Oldham or even Sarah Susanka or Paul Anater.

I asked her what words of advice she had for people dealing with deflating home values and she responded that "people should stop thinking about now." By that she meant that it's easy to lose sight of a future when now looks so bleak. "Prices will rise again eventually, and people with underwater mortgages today won't be underwater forever. If you can hold on, then hold on."

Great advice and if I may add on my own, the ideas and philosophy espoused in the Not So Big books were never more needed or appealing than they are today. If you're interested in any of these ideas, I encourage you to go to Sarah's website, Not So Big. On Not So Big you'll be able to see the show houses she designs as well as participate in discussion forums, buy house plans and even find an architect or designer. While you're there too, you'll notice that Not So Big isn't a style or a trend so much as it is a mindset. A mindset where quality means more than quantity. "Not So Big is completely present," she says "and not an attempt to recreate anything from the past." As an idea, it takes inspiration from and connects to yesterday but it doesn't dwell there. Life moves and changes, but the human need to to live in homes conducive to the business of living never changes. Sarah Susanka's onto something I tell you, she's on to something.

Sarah Susanka and Marc Vassallo's Not So Big Remodeling: A Review

Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live by Sarah Susanka and Marc Vasallo published by Taunton Press, 2009

In the late '90s a new voice emerged to counter the rising tide of the More is Better school of home construction. That voice belonged to Sarah Susanka and through eight books, that voice has remained consistent and calm as it stated again and again that more isn't better, better is better. 

photo by Ken Gutmaker, used with permission

Beginning with The Not So Big House and continuing through Creating The Not So Big House and then on to Inside The Not So Big House and Outside The Not So Big House, her advice has been a level and kind reminder that there's much more to a home than the house. She's offered Not So Big Solutions For Your Home and Home By Design: Transforming Your House Into A Home. Then realizing that she'd been working on describing a way of life and not just a way of building, in 2007 she came out with The Not So Big Life. As I've mentioned previously, The Not So Big House provided me a Road To Damascus moment when it came out in 1998 and her subsequent books have come into my life in much the same way I'd receive the regular visits of a good friend or a cherished relative.

I found out last fall that Sarah Susanka and co-author Marc Vassallo had another installment in the Not So Big series due in March of '09. I blogged about it at the time and Sarah Susanka herself left a comment on one of my posts from last November. To say that made my day is an understatement of staggering proportions. I've had a press copy of Not So Big Remodeling for about four weeks now and I've been carrying it around ever since it arrived. My copy is already dog-eared and jammed with post-it notes. It's her best work to date and is also her second collaboration with Marc Vassallo with whom she wrote Inside The Not So Big House in 2005.

Photo by Ken Gutmaker, used with permission

In Not So Big Remodeling, Susanka and Vassallo put all of thought that went into the Not So Big series into renovation and their timing couldn't have been better. The housing market's collapsed if you haven't heard and more and more people are finding themselves stuck in the home they have. Combine that with the evaporation of the home equity line of credit and there are large numbers of people interested in renovations but with a third the budget they would have had a couple of years ago.

Photo by Greg Premru, used with permission

Not So Big Remodeling speaks directly to a new housing reality and offers sensible and often lower cost ideas about how to turn a house into a home. The book begins with Susanka's own home renovation in Raleigh, NC and uses her experiences with transformation as a launch pad to cover every aspect of her sensible take on home renovation. Not So Big Remodeling is loaded with examples of how to pull off a thoughtful remodel as Susanka and Vassallo start with a home's exterior and work their way through Kitchens and Gathering Rooms; Baths and Personal Spaces; and then they wrap it all up with a section called Pulling It All Together. Pulling It All Together covers such topics as how to deal with a too-large home and how to integrate green practices into your project.

Not So Big Remodeling is at once an inspiring photo essay, an architectural survey and a philosophical treatise. Though it's loaded with examples and floor plans, I wouldn't call it a how-to guide. The examples in the book are there to get the audience to think about their own homes. The goal here is to get people to think about the spaces they call home and then carry the lessons covered in Not So Big Remodeling and interpret them. Not So Big Remodeling is an anti-how-to guide in that sense. Throughout the book, Susanka and Vassallo are pretty adamant about having a home reflect the lives of the people inside of it. With every illustration and photograph there's a gentle nudge to consider the concept being illustrated and not so much the execution.

All told, I'm impressed by this latest installment of the Not So Big series, Not So Big Remodeling and it's a welcome addition to my library. If you're considering undertaking a renovation, it's definitely worth a read. If you just like to think about this sort of thing, then Not So Big Remodeling would great for you too. Just don't ask to borrow my copy. I'm a generous book lender under ordinary circumstances, but my Not So Big books are definitely part of my non-circulating collection. So pick up a copy and use it as an opportunity to think about your space.