Prologue

my environmental hammer

I remember it like it was yesterday.  She asked: “What else is going on in the world of green kitchen design?”  Panic washed over me.  I had already played my one Building Science trump card when I discussed the recent formaldehyde regulations impacting kitchen cabinets, and I had nothing left to say.  There were twenty minutes left to this Building Science podcast, and I was choking…big time. 

Up to that point, I cared about being a good environmental steward and about human health.  But I could not relate to the Building Science – the scientific approach to building that improves energy efficiency and indoor air quality.  Take kitchen ventilation.  I remember listening to a Building Science podcast that spent an hour talking about exhaust fan capture rates.  When you have interviewed 500 people about how they use their kitchen, you know that most people, myself included, almost never turn their hood on because it is loud.  This assertion is backed by a California Indoor Air Quality survey revealing that less than 25% of consumers regularly use their hood.  Geeking out about the science of an appliance that is seldom used is, to me, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  If you really want to improve indoor air quality, you’ll get the motor away from the point-of-use to increase the chances of getting it turned on.  And even then, you’ll be fighting muscle memory.  The slam dunk will come from an integration between the cooking surface and (quiet) ventilation paving the way for a meaningful conversation about capture rates. 

Building Science practitioners are making the world a better place, and I have a lot to learn from them.  Their first lesson for me, from that the podcast experience, was that I had allowed my ambivalence for the science along with the fact that none of my clients ever really challenged my environmental knowledge to justify a lack of it.    So I embarked on a journey of professional growth on my own terms.  Those terms started with examining my environmental origin story to understand what I had to offer. 

As a colleague once said during a Building Science discussion group “our consumption got us into this mess; we aren’t going to consume our way out of it.”  When we focus our lens on the inside of our homes, we see a treadmill of rapacious consumption – big closets, appliances that fail after a few years, and cheap, trendy furniture destined for a landfill.  Making better stuff in better ways is exciting and essential, but it is just not enough.  Housing must learn the same lessons as fast fashion and find a way to slow down.

You probably know that.  If you are reading this, awareness is not the problem.  The problem is that curbing our consumption is hard.  Consumption is woven into every fiber of our culture.  It defines our celebrations and traditions.  It drives our educational and career pursuits.  It governs where and how we live and recreate.  It has fundamentally altered food production.  And it sends loud and clear signals to our children about their social standing.  Not only has excessive consumption been normalized, but it is accelerating at a frightening rate.  Going against that grain takes courage. 

Beyond courage, slowing consumption down takes endurance.  We are reliant upon large systems for the necessities of life.  We cannot stop consuming products any more than we can stop consuming food.  Altering our consumption patterns is a lifelong evolution of putting one foot in front of the other.   The task at hand is to define a consumption methadone program that you can live with…forever.

These blog posts outline an interior design philosophy geared towards slowing down consumption and ramping up our long-term joy with our homes.  This philosophy is born out of my personal consumption methadone program.  Like most recovery stories, mine is not always pretty.  I decided to tell it after being told over and over that I have, “an unusual perspective” that people value.    

My takeaways are hard to put into boxes, so there’s some overlap in these posts.  The posts all are rooted in common sense, so they may not feel revelatory.  But trust me – just because they are simple, does not make them easy.  Thus, the goal in their telling, if nothing else, is to inspire you to keep the faith.