“Home is where our story begins.”
– Annie Danielson
This is the view from James Madison’s desk in his home, Montpelier, located in Orange County, Virginia. This desk is in the middle of his second-floor library that houses over 1500 books. On my recent visit, I arrived at this room after visiting the dining room where the guide spoke of the many guests and…
Revision is a messy business. Then again, so is moving a house. This is our family cottage undergoing a significant revision. In 2005, we moved the cottage to a new location after twenty-three years in this location on Whalehead Beach, NC. The area around the cottage had become cluttered with houses more akin to mini-hotels,…
I sometimes attach meaning to houses that may be too nostalgic. But houses are where lives are lived, where memories are made, and where the past becomes a marker for understanding the present. And to build them takes a lot of people with different roles. This house is our family cottage, built in 1980 on…
Most art collections are housed in halls and museums that inspire awe and reverence. One unique art collection is housed in a building that from the outside is an elegant place built of concrete and manicured gardens with quoi ponds and a lush landscape. But from the inside the museum is meant to resemble a…
When my husband and I travel, I like to plan and he likes to just go—no map in hand, no tour guide, no reviews or ratings needed. Opposites to the bitter end, we are. But we’ve figured out a way to compromise. In December of 2019, we visited Kauai with his parents to celebrate their…
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of my favorite architects, mostly because he was such a prolific architect of homes and churches, leaving a trail of evidence of his perspective and talent in dozens of neighborhoods around the country. With over five hundred of his nearly one thousand designs having been built, his Prairie style or…
