Place-Making: Ground Your Home
“Put into practice, place-making seeks to build or improve public space, spark public discourse, create beauty and delight, engender civic pride, connect neighborhoods, support community health and safety, grow social justice, catalyze economic development, promote environmental sustainability, and of course nurture an authentic sense of place.”
“Places In The Making Report” MIT
We love place-making in our cities and communities, we love it in our parks and along our streets. We seek it out in our restaurants and shopping districts. But we don’t often talk about place-making in relation to home. I think that is partly due to the fact that we naturally make places in our homes. But the trend in housing for a more mass produced home, breaks down the natural place-making that used to develop around home and land.
We tend to see a very white washed pallet in homes as they try to appeal to the largest sampling of buyers. But then what happens to place? It’s definitely more than slapping pictures on the wall. Place-making in our homes has to develop around our own story and nurture our own beauty and delight, connecting us to the things we love and the people and culture of our history and story.
A simple way to see place-making in the home is to think of it as telling your story with the space you have and letting that space reflect your greatest beauty and delight back to you. But there are also some key factors you can work off of and this month, we’d like to share those with you so you can begin, or continue, on your journey of place-making in your home.
Safety
Safety is the most important factor in place-making. How we create safe space with our homes and in our communities is critical to truly finding a place. Many factors are involved in this but each person is unique and you have to think about what brings calm, and peace to your home and how you can bring that if it isn’t there.
Seclusion and ownership are one element we all need. If we cannot find a sense of this in our home, a room, or a corner that is ours, we cannot feel truly safe or at home.
Sound is a huge factor in agitation and triggering for everyone. Each person has a different level of tolerance or acceptance to sound. But we must think about how we manage sound in our home and what makes us feel comfortable.
Use of Space
We all have the normal spaces in a home we can tick off on our fingers; the rooms we want or don’t in our house. But how we use those spaces can change drastically. A few simple things we see in discussions with our clients daily;
TV in the living room or not? This changes the use of the space significantly and will move your family into or out of this room.
Laundry near the bedrooms or in the utility room. The location of this space changes how you use it and the daily operations of your home.
Views and Lighting
Views and Lighting are powerful in the creation of a home. They can make or break a beautiful space. But they also have an impact on our sense of place. Finding a balance in lighting and views is always important.
Too open and exposed a space can feel unsafe or make one feel insecure.
Dark and cluttered spaces make us anxious about running into a chair or kicking a toy, and can feel overwhelming to the senses.
Color
We love all the colors at GCD, which is why we get soooo excited to share about color in place-making. Your home should reflect your mood and general culture. Each room in your home should respond to its use, while reflecting your personality.
If your family tends to be loud and rambunctious maybe we take the kitchen and living room into a bright and vibrant color pallet to bring that bounce in your step out every day.
If you tend to like quiet and solitude, you might think of a dark pallet that brings the warmth of a blanket wrapped around you into your home office, or bedroom.
Seasonal Use
Something we don’t always think about in our homes is seasonal use. What happens in the summer when the kids are home all day? What happens in the winter when we can’t use the patio. How does our home shift and flex with changing seasons; both natural seasons and seasons of life as we grow. We tend in America to think of homes as stepping stones, we start small, then step up as we grow, and then step back down again as we retire and settle down.
What if we didn’t have to move? What if our home could grow and shrink with us? If we use place-making well, we can extend the use and life of our homes for years longer than we anticipated.
So how did we do it?
Meg and I love to entertain; we are a loud and interruptive culture with 3 boys and lots of energy. So our home is very light and bright with a lot of connection to outdoor space. We want to be able to tell the boys “Take that game outside!” and have them bouncing out the nearest door before the basketball breaks a window.
We found safety and security in creating a more private wing of the house which we feel ourselves retreat into at night for cozy snuggles in our own spaces with our books or toys.
We separated our office in a loft so we feel in control of our space while working, and enough separation that, with the help of some headphones, we can “get it done” even when the kids are home. Noise is a factor, honest truth; with three boys and a love of music, it gets pretty loud, but we each find our own space.
The boys share a room, but we’ve given each of them a specific section of closet that is theirs, and their bed area is their own domain. So they decorate and claim their space bringing all their unique life and expression to it, and they guard it like a badger guarding a hole at times.
Our favorite rooms are the ones we gather in; the kitchen with room enough for all of us to cook and clean together, the living room where we talk and read, and play games. Media room, where we snuggle up on the couch and watch a movie or listen to music. We can all find our home here.
An illustration taken from Spotify illustrating the community approach to placemaking as employed by Project for Public Spaces.
Now that you have a picture of what place-making is, and how we did our own version, I want to challenge you to think of your version. Before you walk away thinking you have to have tons of money or an art/design degree, remember that a simple way to see place-making in the home is to think of it as telling your story with the space you have and letting the space reflect your greatest beauty and delight back to you.
You are the best person to know what your beauty and delight is. You are the only one that can tell your story. Decide what story you’re telling and make your place reflect that.
So to land this plane and let us all get back to our lives, I put together a list of place-making prompts or questions. Take these and ask them in your home, to your family and friends. Start to understand how your space can tell your story a little more, and if you need help we are always here to lend a hand.
Q and R (Question and Reflect, we don’t have all the answers ;p )
How would you describe your family?
Loud and wild
Fun and funky
Quiet and reflective
Simple and secluded
What does safe and secure mean to your family?
What are your family's “seasons”?
What is your theme or aesthetic?
Gothic
Scandinavian
Minimalist
Mid-century Modern
What base color best describes your family?
Red
Yellow
Blue
Orange
Green
Purple
Take some time and walk through the questions and the factors we listed out and make your place!
About the Author
Cale is a Co-Owner and Principal Architect at Green Couch Design, a boutique architecture firm located in Oklahoma. He writes about architecture, construction, development, leasing, homesteading, place-making, business ownership, and dose of nerdom when it’s appropriate.
