Living Room

Have you ever imagined what it would be like if the room you were in dematerialized around you? A room: six or so flat planes enclosing a space in which someone or something can exist removed, protected from the environment beyond those walls. But walls do not only frame space, they preserve the ephemeral; they materialize the intangible.

Through harrowing trial and error, I have learned to conjure my primary ideal of home, teleporting myself back to the place that has been a constant in my life: my grandparents’ living room. I grew up in that house. A hundred years ago, the house sat on a beautiful horse-country road that would eventually take you from the Virginia countryside to Washington, DC, but not before overwhelming you with rolling hills and glowing vegetation, framed in the infinite distance by purple mountains whose majesty came from their weathered repose. I gestated in this house and in this region I now describe as a Ralph Lauren ad built atop a slave burial ground.

The living room, toward the bottom of the list of spaces most commonly inhabited in the sprawling twelve-room house, became my personal sanctuary, laboratory, therapy chamber, and private reckoning place. The absence of regular traffic gave the room a sanctimoniousness that made it feel like a privileged place.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)