It was in a rawther blasé fashion that I flipped through the latest issue of House Beautiful. I was disappointed that the hardly-glossy, much-more-newspaper-y paper which had been (noticeably) used for the first time for the prior issue had been used again, thus suggesting a permanent switch (downgrade) rather than an isolated glitch. House Beautiful having to bootstrap-it to compensate for blah-blah-blah doesn't exactly enliven the spirit, you know? And for two, nothing in the (flat) ...

Mine was a driving family, a fact which I attribute to my dad's having fallen prey, long ago, to the siren song of the road trip. He excites at the prospect of a long drive the way others might find themselves drawn to watch a football game, take a hike, or hop on a flight. Yes, we spent so very many hours packed into our purple minivan, Dodge Caravan That Could-ing it. We routinely traversed ...

[Psst: I'm back! Here's what you missed: I frolicked in Greece for about two weeks, which was utterly heavenly, I returned to Seattle to do a few client projects, and then I jetted back to Detroit to be with my family. It's been (a blur of) a month (a month!) since my last post, which is the longest I have ever taken off from the blog in all the many, many years of writing it. ...

If we could build the perfect house from scratch, what would it look like? What features would it contain? Let’s have ourselves a little daydream… The other day, I had a big mound of clean laundry to fold. Before I began, I pressed play on a youtube video, as one does. Olivia Munn was surprising her tiny, asian mother with a kitchen renovation. (Stars: they're just like us! Their parents live in ugly, outdated hovels!) ...