Devi Dutta-Choudhury - House to Home: Designing Your Space for the Way You Live

I like to think of myself as a modern person. Like most anyone living today (or at least reading this book), I was raised in contemporary society, some urban and some suburban and even a little global. And I am a product of modernity, which includes everything from indoor plumbing to democracy. When it comes to your home, what does modern really mean? Homes should make our lives easier and be conducive to the ways we live today. Our lives are typically complicated, with working parents, kids in school, social networks to maintain both virtually and in real time, and, ultimately, a desire to keep it all together. We are busy, and we are connected to a larger world. We spend time with our families and strive to keep them functional. We cook and eat out. Our tastes are both general and specific. Yet, our complex lives have some very simple spatial needs. Our physical homes are the link between these disparate and converging aspects of our lives. This is modernity, and our homes should be designed to support it.

While I will always promote modern principles of design such as large windows, clean lines, and seamless transitions, I dont want to create a stylistic dogma with this guide. There are many styles out there, and I dont want to pigeonhole myself or you the reader by advocating any particular style. Most of us are into a lot of different home styles, or were just thankful for a home at all. We may remember the New England colonial, or high-rise apartment, or commune in Oregon that we grew up inbut we also incorporate style weve picked up along the way. The set of Mad Men was so lauded not just because it captured the midcentury modern era so completely, but because if you look closely, there are items from the many decades preceding the midcentury ones. A 1920s lamp may sit alongside an Eames chair. An old oil portrait hangs near modern Nelson lamps. Thats how most people live. Its rare to buy your home and furniture all at once. You buy a house. You live with a mattress on the floor or steel frame while you save up money or find the bed you want. (Or in our case, wait for your husband to finish making a handmade bed frame.) Then you add a vintage cabinet your mother leaves you. Then you buy an IKEA dresser because it works and it looks good. This is how style emerges for most of us. Our homes are a representation of our lives thus far, so it may not always match. Im here to tell you thats okay! Homes are organic and dynamic and should allow change. But when we improve our homes, we can create the space we need to live our modern lives, and thats not about style, its about life.

This book is a rough guide to improving your home through the lens of my familys experience in creating our own sort-of-modern home in California, which is still a work in progress. My husband and I were a young working couple with a two-year-old daughter, looking to buy a home. This was in San Francisco in 2004, so the options in our budget at that time were to buy a TIC (tenancy in common) flat in an old Victorian (San Franciscos version of a co-op) or look farther afield to get more space for less money. We ended up across the Bay in Berkeley, California. Berkeley was a place I had visited and was sort of intrigued by. It was at its core a college town, but it also had many other aspects. It had a reputation for good food, good schools, and free speech, not necessarily in that orderand yet I was very skeptical about leaving the city for the burbs, so to speak. When we found this sweet little house in the hills, I was certain we would just do a quick renovation, live here for a few bucolic years, then come back to a city home when we could afford it. This has not happenedwe ended up so immersing ourselves in this home, our neighborhood, and the city around us that we are literally a part of Berkeley now. For better or for worse, I couldnt imagine it any other way.

Even though I was not desperate to live in Berkeley at first, once I saw the house and the neighborhood, I was drawn to it immediately. This book is peppered with the details of our home, but essentially, it was a major fixer-upperand that is being generous. The real estate listing even said, bring your contractor! From the conversations we overheard from other potential buyers, the consensus seemed to be that this house should be torn down. It was in a good, though secluded, neighborhood, but it did not have that instant curb appeal that can draw you in. A gate with a broken hinge was the first thing you saw from the street. A rotted trellis heavy with a bramble-like planting covered the front door. But once you got in, you could see the potential, and the essential qualities of a good home were all there. My husband and I put an offer on the house during that fast rise to the boom of the housing market and were lucky enough not to be caught up in a bidding war. No one else really wanted this house and all of the work it would take to improve it. Our offer was accepted, and so began this journey.