Back in the planning days of this project....

Back in the planning days of this project, whenever I would politely ask Jason if there was going to be a coat closet by the door or a place big enough in the laundry room where I could put my sewing machine and ironing board, his response was, "This is going to be a different way of living."

I have pondered that statement several times over the past few months, and I think that would be worthy of an interview in a future blog: A Different Way of Living by theworkshop 308. I'll see what I can do.

Meanwhile, I take those words to mean not only "space is money", but the more stuff you have the more space you need and the more space and stuff you have and need the more you have to take care of it, both mentally and physically.....and that certainly leads to less time and freedom to be happy and at peace with yourself, the people you care about and with the life you will live both in and out of this uniquely designed house. In other words, enough IS enough, and less IS more.

When you flip through the pages of DWELL magazine, you don't see stacks of year-old magazines in rotten baskets, abandoned craft projects, future craft projects, fashion mistakes and ill-fitting clothes hanging in closets, drawers of hotel shampoos and conditioners, old college textbooks and half-filled notebooks, old trophies and plaques, empty plastic ice cream containers, rolls of wrinkled gift wrap, useless and broken tools and gadgets, cracked styrofoam coolers, shells from a 6th grade trip to the beach, 5K T-shirts, feel-good poetry books, old birthday cards, ugly wind chimes, expired coupons, cheap pens, empty film containers and cardboard boxes, wrinkled tin foil loaf pans, off-brand plastic wrap gone astray, tapes and CDs that were never liked, cookbooks never used, jewelry never worn, old keys, TV offers, old dog collars, worn-out gloves, cigarette lighter collections, souvenir ticket stubs, broken suitcases, photos of perfect strangers, wrong-shade lipsticks or metal lawn chairs that need re-webbing. (Or if you do see them, they have been re-worked and re-priced and are now considered "art objects".)

So.....what did those hip (and usually bare-footed), casually chic folks in DWELL do with all of those things of theirs? And, is that why they all look so calm and smart and reasonably happy?

A different way of living. Ahhhhhhhh.

I bet it would take a whole shipping container to hold all of that stuff you never see in DWELL.