Erica Bauermeister - House Lessons: Renovating a Life

Buyers are liars.

Every real estate agent ever

WHEN I WAS YOUNG , my mother used to take all five of her kids on an annual quest for the family Christmas tree. We would travel around Los Angeles in our wood-paneled station wagon, from one lot of precut evergreens to another, searching for the perfect tree. As the trip dragged on, there were times I questioned my mothers sanity, and yet when my mother found her tree it created a satisfaction within her that I could see even if I didnt always understand. Maybe a particular height reminded her of being a child herself; perhaps a certain shade of green reached into her soul. I never really knew, and perhaps knowing was never the point. When I would ask what she was looking for, my mother would just smile and say: It has to talk to me.

Any honest real estate agent will tell you that most home buyers decisions are no more rational than my mothers with her tree. There was a time in my life, years after I first encountered that ramshackle house in Port Townsend, when I was an agent myself, walking buyers through the process and dutifully helping them draw up their lists of requirements. I would listen to a couple emphatically assert that they needed four bedrooms, two baths, and a no-maintenance yardand then watch as they fell in love with a tiny garden-becalmed cottage that they spotted on the way to the house that met every one of their specifications. It happened over and over and over. While we might like to believe that our house needs are pragmatic line items, our true needs, the ones that drive our decisions, come far more often from some deep and unacknowledged wellspring of memories and desires.

Because heres the thingwe arent looking for a house; were looking for a home. A house can supply you with a place to sleep, to cook, to store your car. A home fits your soul. In ancient Rome, the term domus, from which we get the word domicile, meant both people and place, an unspoken relationship that we feel like a heartbeat. A home fulfills needs you didnt know you had, so it is no wonder that when pressed for an explanation for our choices we give reasons that make no sense, pointing to a bunch of dried lavender hanging in the kitchen, a porch swing, the blue of a front dooralmost always things that could be re-created in a house that fits the list. But sense is not the point. These small details are simply visual indicators of an architectural personality that fits our own, that reminds us of a childhood home, or a house, filled with color and the laughter of children, that we visited on a vacation in Mexico.

And yet a choice of a home is not just about where weve been or what we remember; its also about who we want to be. As Winston Churchill famously said: We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us. When we choose a house, we are making a decision about how we will live. I dont mean in the obvious way of how long your commute to work will be, or whether there are schools or stores or friends nearbyalthough all of those things are important and will impact your life. What I am talking about is something far more subliminal. The designs of our homes quite literally change us. An eating nook for two invites a busy couple to slow down every morning for coffee. A courtyard in an apartment building helps create community. A south-facing window encourages optimism, while alcoves foster book lovers. Perhaps one of the strongest blows for feminism came from the first sledgehammer that opened a kitchen to a family room and changed the view of the cook, from both sides of the wall.