Our Homes As Extensions Of Our "Selves"

by Barbara Bannon Harwood

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Winston Churchill

Churchill liked this statement so much he used it twice, first in 1924 at the English Architectural Association, then in 1943 upon the occasion of requesting that the bombed-out Parliament be rebuilt exactly as before. The first time he said, “There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”

It is important to understand that our homes are truly extensions of ourselves in perhaps an even more profound way than we realize. We buy our image of what we "belong" in. Then we add our own particular mix of interior color, material, furniture, and art that feels comfortable to us.

So often I have worked with clients who wanted far more than they could afford, and houses that didn’t seem to fit their evident personas even a little bit. I fell in love with one such young couple the minute I saw them because they looked so "un-Dallas." He had a couple-of-days’ beard, a mustache, glasses, longish hair and was dressed in a workshirt and jeans. His passive, smiling, and adoring wife was in a simple T-shirt and pants. He was a delivery man for an overnight service, and she worked for a bank. Bouncing around them, with a million questions a minute, was a bright-eyed girl of four or five. They told me they had been prequalified at a bank for a $125,000 house. Then they showed me plans for a Georgian-style 3000-plus square foot (sq. ft.) mansion with a colonnaded front porch, large living room, dining room, family room, kitchen, and master bedroom/bath on the main floor and three bedrooms above. The father, who did all the talking, said he would require a "few" changes because he wanted an office on the first floor, but they would cut costs by not finishing the second floor. When I asked where the office would go, he wasn’t sure, but he wanted it somewhere immediately behind the elaborate, colonnaded porch. When asked where the little girl would have her room, he said she would probably share their room or have a bed in the dining room for the moment.

I gently tried to tell them that they might be happier with a smaller, better-designed house, and volunteered to find them one in a plan book that we could alter. I did the research and faxed them some designs a week or so later. When they returned, the man brought the picture of his original house back again. None of the ones I had found were right, he said, in spite of the fact they met the physical needs he had described. When I finally asked exactly what it was about that house he liked most, he said, “It looks like I want a house to look. I’ve been poor all my life, and I want to feel like I’ve really made it. We’ve saved most of my wife’s salary for l0 years to get a house like this.”

hat was hard to argue with because I knew the man wouldn’t realize that it didn’t do for him what he thought it would until he tried to live in it. If he had the kind of job that required entertaining a lot, or if he lived a daily lifestyle in which he circulated to parties in similar houses, maybe it would live the way he thought it would. However, I knew that when he realized he could skateboard with his daughter in the gigantic family room, he might wish he’d left that space in the backyard and used some of that l0 years’ worth of savings to take a trip around the world… or just hung on to it for a rainy day.

So the first thing you need to do when you look for a house that will heal your spirit is to think about yourself and who you really are — not who you were in another life or who you think you would like to be in this one. Then remember the house, in order to feel good to you, must allow you to "play" in and around it. "Play" means let out your own happy child and relax; as children do when they play. What is your happy child inside going to feel like if you’re saddled with more debt than you are comfortable with — with a house you have to spend every spare minute cleaning because you can’t afford help? I’m guessing your happy child would rather go fishing!

That sweet, unassuming man in the previous example works 12 to 14 hours a day. When he gets home, he wants to crash in a comfortable chair and read the paper while his wife puts his dinner in front of him. Is he going to be able to do that in his grand house? Where is a comfy old lounger going to go in it? He’s probably going to feel as if he should hide it — as well as himself in his work clothes — in the unfinished upstairs area. The house takes up most of the lot, as these grand houses in Dallas do more and more lately. Where is he going to play with that charming, inquisitive, and active child? Where is the kid going to look for snails and worms in a garden or build a playhouse out of an abandoned shipping box? Where is she going to wiggle her toes in the grass and watch for birds in the trees? Not in their backyard, and not even in the nearby area, because every block is filled with great big, pretentious houses on small lots. No spacious backyards. No parks.

ho are these houses serving? Dare I say that it is the building industry only? The home-buying public has been sold a bill of goods that bigger is better, grander is more impressive, and impressive equates to happiness. We need the right kind of brick, the perfect flooring system, lighting designed by professionals inside and out, the designer colors of the day on our walls and in our sheets, and above all, the approach must be a frontal assault of finery not only better than the Joneses, but better than ourselves. It must be the person we think we want to be. It must be our new self-image.

Why It’s Hazardous Buying a Home That Way

Is the above situation dangerous? Of course. If the place we call "home" isn’t a homey place for our real selves, then we will never feel comfortable. If we never feel comfortable, we will never be able to truly relax. If we can never really relax, then we certainly can’t heal, because our bodies will never be in balance. Balance is such an ancient word, yet it is so little considered today. The ancient Chinese philosophers called it the yin and yang — balancing the two sides of selves, balancing the inner and the outer, the right and the left. To find this balance in our lives, the yin of our soul self — that which we really are when alone in the dark with no one at all to answer to but the most basic part of ourselves — must be able to blend with its yang external environment so each — our yin and yang — can give each other nourishment.

An example of our environment giving us nourishment (which you can do yourselves) happens with trees and people. Sometime, when you are very tired and burned out, go outside to a fairly large tree in a quiet environment. Lean your back against the tree with your feet slightly away from the base. Put your arms back and to your sides, embracing the tree. Close your eyes and just relax. Silently, slowly, ask the tree to give you energy. Wait, and feel its flow pour into you. It doesn’t happen in seconds, but it does happen in five or ten minutes. You’ll be amazed. You will never again think of a tree as "just a tree." That is precisely the kind of energy a Healing House should give you. It is, after all, made of the wood of a living being — a tree.

The second danger in buying or building a house for the person we think we want to be is that when that image we are creating is not real, it will change often. There is always the chance that, after that self-image changes, you will be in a home you have a hard time getting out of, in which case Shakespeare’s admonition, “To thine own self be true” has even more far-reaching implications than a student of literature might have thought. Perhaps that is why the national average occupancy of a new home is seven years. We take seven years to find out the "image" we bought for ourselves wasn’t really comfortable. So we continue to look for what we think we want, and the cycle begins again because we have never really understood what we want is a house that heals our spirits. ¤

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