I’m not much of a wine drinker, though my dad makes some great wine and I’m happy to have a glass when we have dinner together or if my wife opens a bottle at home. The sometimes frustrating and always fascinating aspect of wine to me is the importance of the story: average wine can be elevated by a great origin story, a fitting label, or just the geographic provenance that I’m looking for. For a long time, my engineering mindset saw this as a flaw, a weakness in the argument that great wine was objectively better than mediocre wine. How could it be better if you could so significantly skew what people thought of the wine by what you put on the label?

Over the years, I’ve grown to look at enjoying wine as a process of finding the right bottle for the evening- rather than objective quality being the final word on wine, which could unfortunately be influenced by irrelevant other factors. The experience of learning about, picking, and drinking the wine are all together the point of it all, and the flavor of the wine is enriched by whatever knowledge you have about it.

For someone that doesn’t drink much wine (or think about it very often), I’ve gone on too long about it, so let me explain the connection to something that I think about much much more: what it is that makes a good house, or a good space within a house. Clearly good living space should function well, it should protect us from weather, allow light and views in, hold our stuff, be an efficient workspace for the things we do at home, and so on. But just as clearly, we hope for our spaces to be more than that, just like we want something more than two-buck chuck for an anniversary dinner.

Good spaces are a product of several forces. First, they are and should be a reflection of the people who occupy them and how they live. They are also a reflection of who we are and how we live in a cultural sense, the patterns of building that show up again and again over the centuries are not accidental nor inevitable. And good spaces come from good craftspeople, who pay attention to the people and the patterns and the setting and the conditions and help make sense of it. Like wine, remodeling and house building is much more about finding the right good thing, or balance of good things, than it is finding the universal best thing.

Zak