By JENNA CARERI
Our houses are more than just brick, and wood and metal, says San Francisco architect and writer Catherine Armsden. No matter where we live — a fifth-floor walk-up in Philadelphia, a 100-year-old farmhouse in Nebraska, an ultra-modern skyscraper in Dallas — our houses are where we build our lives. They become a part of us.
Armsden, a co-owner with her husband, Lewis Butler, of Butler Armsden Architects in San Francisco, spent a quarter-century creating living spaces for clients, so she understands that attachment. But, she began to wonder: How are we shaped by our houses? How does an arrangement of rooms affect emotions?
Armsden, 60, raised these questions earlier this month at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as part of the Department of Architecture’s “Women in Design” lecture series. She was joined on a discussion panel by UMass architecture professors Kathleen Lugosch and Ray Kinoshita Mann.
“We talk about how our families have shaped us but really our houses have shaped us in profound ways, too,” Armsden said in her presentation to about 80 architecture and design students and professors. “They have a way of harboring the best of nurturance but also the worst of injury, and we’re really at our most powerful and powerless when we’re in them.”
Armsden’s interest in the relationship between people and their homes grew out of her work in college, experimenting with structure and the placement of walls, first at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art in 1977 and then at Harvard University in Cambridge, where she received a master’s degree in architecture in 1984.
“I was always fascinated with the idea of walls, and how walls divide us, and how we make windows and doors that sort of penetrate walls and we get a view into something else, how sound is transmitted through walls or isn’t,” she said.
The connection of walls and rooms, she says, affects social interaction and the atmosphere of the home.
“In the most practical way, I think the shape of our houses, the layout of rooms, is really critical to how we’re shaped emotionally.”
Those concepts became the heart of “Dream House,” Armsden’s first novel, published in 2015 by Bonhomie Press in San Francisco, for which she used her own childhood home as a template.
That house — a two-floor New England foursquare — has a compact design, with four rooms over four rooms and one bathroom.
“No privacy,” Armsden told the audience. “Everybody’s emotional lives were on view pretty much all the time.” Sharing one bathroom with her parents, and two sisters was a challenge.
“Being in the bathroom, if you were in there for any length of time, always someone knocked and said, ‘Can I come in? I just want to brush my teeth,’ ” she said.
There also was no escaping sounds in the house, she says, which was especially difficult: Her mother suffered from depression and everyone could hear her weeping behind closed doors.
“I was kept awake a lot at night,” Armsden said.
As a result, she values privacy — her own and others’.
“Growing up in that house where we had no privacy made me very aware of my own kids’ need for privacy while at home,” she said. “I was determined to convey to my kids my excitement about their independent endeavors. I actually think I’ve overcompensated a bit, though, because I’ve been told by them that I don’t call them enough.”
Armsden revisited her childhood home in Maine shortly after her UMass presentation. The woman who lives there now invited her to see how it had been remodeled. It was her first visit to the house since her parents died — her mother in 2006 and her father in 2009.
“When I went in the house, I realized that my feelings for it are gone,” she said. “I think being there sort of drove home the fact that my parents are gone now and that they were the energy in the house.”
Armsden says the resonance she once felt with her childhood home is what people look for in the architecture of their new houses, and they search for pieces that remind them of old homes they have loved.
But, she says, the balance between creating a dream house and a house that feels like a home can be elusive.
Some clients control every detail in the new house, only to sell it a few years later, she says.
“Obviously they weren’t getting it,” Armsden said. “Whatever it was they were after they weren’t getting it the first time.”
When it comes to making a house feel like a home, each person has a different trigger. For example, Armsden had one client who desperately wanted an attic in her house because she and her brothers used to spend hours in her parents’ attic as children.
It also comes through details.
“It’s actually kind of amazing how people respond to, when they’re creating a house, just the quality of light that reminds them of a place they’ve lived before,” she said.
Armsden says when she and her husband were remodeling their own house in San Francisco, they had to place the bathroom windows high on the wall because it faced their neighbor’s house.
That ended up bringing back a pleasant memory.
“I was so struck and so happy when I realized that my house in Maine had two windows that were high up on the wall, that like my house in San Francisco the wall faced south,” she said, allowing sun to stream in, the way in did in her childhood home.
“Something as small as that can just evoke some emotional response,” Armsden said. “It’s about some kind of sensory equilibrium that makes people feel at home.”