The Principles of Natural Design

The following 7 principles are the building blocks I use to create spaces that feel alive. I believe them to be, to a large extent, timeless and universal, and therefore essential. The focus of my work is helping people integrate these principles in their homes.

1. Use natural materials. Wherever you can, use natural materials such as wood, stone and forms of earthen construction. They make us feel much better than synthetic or composite materials. They are also usually healthier for you and the planet.

2. Keep it "roundish." The natural world knows very few sharp, hard angles. For about 2 million years we have lived in a world that is mostly "roundish". Integrating that biological memory into our homes will bring to us comfort, strength, efficiency and beauty.

3. Bring mass into your home. The better you can regulate the temperature in your homes, the more comfortable you feel. The best and most natural way to do this is to make your home as heavy as you can. The more weight, the more heat can be stored and hence your home stays warm longer in the winter and heats up slower in the summer. The mass also helps you to make the best use of passive solar energy and radiant heat sources, such as wood burning stoves.

4. Connect the inside to the outside. Always do everything you can to make sure that you don't isolate your home from the outside world. The way we deal with window placement, entrances, porches, decks and especially "outdoor rooms", is of vital importance to making homes livable.

5. Make design follow function. When designing, define your needs in the form of verbs instead of nouns. So rather than "I need a bedroom" say, "I need a comfortable place to sleep". It is then that we can truly craft spaces perfectly, and make them relate well to one another.

6. Make it fit! Size spaces according to what is really happening in that space. Right now in our culture, the trend is to build larger and larger houses. To create a feeling of spaciousness, we can apply much more sophisticated (and affordable) techniques than just adding more rooms and square footage.

7. Don't homogenize your home. Consider features such as ceiling height, furniture, wall texture, lighting, heat, etc. Whenever we, within these features, homogenize (same ceiling height everywhere, whole house heating system, matching furniture, etc.), our houses become a sum of lifeless features. Instead, we should consider ways to make our walls not perfectly straight and flat, we should vary ceiling and floor heights to keep us alert, we can vary temperature depending on the activity level in different parts of the house, and we can create pools of light centered around activities, instead of losing intimacy and function by lighting up the whole house.