Given what we do at FH Perry Builder, it is tempting, each time I write, to address some notion of the essence of home. I don’t do it often. It can seem like such an intolerable cliché. A country store image of a cross-stitched sampler that hasn’t been dusted in years flashes through my mind: “Home Is Where the Heart Is” (why is that what comes up for me?) Which just doesn’t seem like the kind of “home” we do around here.
But maybe it is.
There is a cottage on Lake Ossipee. I honestly have no idea it’s actual size and I couldn’t find it if I tried. It lives in faded 1980’s Polaroids of my memory. Maybe two or three bedrooms, a galley kitchen, an unremarkable single bath. Worn pine cabinets. Hassocks covered with brightly colored, crocheted blankets. Wood paneled walls, orangey brown burlap lampshades, carpets and countertops, scratchy, tightly woven couch upholstery.
A house we visited a handful of times. Family friends. Now that I think about it, how did we even fit our two families of four? But we did. And I’m pretty sure that sampler hung on the short wall between where the kitchen turned into the family room.
Oh. That explains it.
I love the embodied memory I have of this place. How it felt like walking into a warm embrace able to temporarily sooth the prepubescent hormones otherwise wreaking havoc on my emotional well-being. My parents would probably beg to differ, left to manage my soul-stirring outbursts—the ones I couldn’t help because I felt such a lack of control over my own body. Except when I was in Ossipee, where I seemed to feel safe to be myself.
Home. The place where you can feel safe enough to be yourself? But that can take a while to figure out. If I were to set about working with an architect and a builder right now, I’m not sure I could articulate any of this because I actually don’t want a tiny cabin with a shared bathroom and wood paneled hallways. I just want that feeling inside a modern-day rendition of who I am now.*
Which is what makes our work, or at least those who do it best, a synergistic and elegantly strategized braiding of relational intellect, sage knowledge of craft and technical detail, and bold business acuity. Like every other industry, the sophistication requirements of the job itself no longer tolerate anything less than 10,000 hours and then a lifetime more devoted to maestro-like orchestration. For us, this braid is our duty. Our lifeblood. The entirety of our focus. It’s what we meet about and train for and collaborate on with design teams and trades who devote the same. None of us has time for anything less.
And we don’t leave it to chance. Yes, there are weekly budget reviews and schedule look aheads, but there are RFI’s and week end updates and job cost and work in progress reports. There are weekly client meetings, strategy sessions with trades and design teams, neighborhood harmonization methods, adherences to city official requests and regulations. There are hearts and minds to synchronize, self-awarenesses to develop, leadership skills to study. And I have yet to mention the craft, technical, and material know-how.
All in. Staying nimble while executing incredibly complicated processes inside complex and ever-changing human systems. Because when you’re dealing with creating places where people feel safe to be themselves, the experience to get there has to feel safe as well.
Our sampler at FH Perry Builder reads:
Human
Empathic
Adaptable
Refined
Transparent
Communicative
It’s safe here.
Come on home.
Allison
*I do think architect Mark Hutker starts here. By listening to a client’s narrative around which he then designs the home. As described in his new book New England Coastal, Homes That Tell a Story.
