Essay No. 01

Luxury That Isn’t

The house that forgot about people

The first thing this house was trying to impress us with was its location.

That much was clear. And they knew it. They were absolutely leaning on the location of this home to carry them. A crutch, I presume.

While I was making my way to the entry, I was having a pleasant enough time. The yard, while overly perfect with its pristine turf and harsh right angles everywhere you looked, was unquestionably a proper choice given the home’s exterior. Everything was smooth and level all the way up the walk.

Until I saw the threshold.

As I approached the door, I found myself getting caught up in trying to time my steps so I could step over this monstrosity.

There was an elevated slab, ultra wide, maybe twelve inches or so, jutting up from the flat surroundings. On top of that sat the door’s own personal threshold. A layering of thresholds, so to speak.

Together they totaled roughly two inches of height.

An awkward height and width to make your way over, no doubt.

I was no longer enjoying the experience of approaching this beautiful home. I was instead considering how I should space my steps, and whether I should try to step clear over the whole thing or step directly on the threshold.

Stepping on it felt wrong in its own way.

Stepping over it felt juvenile.

No correct answers here.

Then I imagined someone’s grandparents coming over for dinner, and the issue this step would give a person with mobility challenges.

Who would do this to us? I thought.

A front door should welcome you into the house, not make you question every move you make. 

Good design anticipates the body before it even reaches the front door.

We make it inside.

I still can’t actually tell you what the front doors look like.

The space is grand. The fireplace, with its wide and almost infinitely tall level-five drywall face, is flanked on either side by walnut-toned built-in shelves.

With not an integrated LED in sight.

A sin against all sins in a house like this.

In a home that will likely sell for somewhere between eight and ten million dollars, leaving out something as simple as shelf lighting is baffling.

Bookshelves are not just storage. They’re a stage. A place where people display pieces of their lives. Books they love, artifacts from their travels, small objects that carry stories.

Lighting those objects gives them presence.

It adds warmth and depth to a room. It creates atmosphere when friends are gathered in the evening and the overhead lights are dimmed. It casts shadows. It brings out the texture of the wood.

Without lighting, the shelves felt hollow. Decorative space waiting to be filled, but not actually designed to hold meaning.

Then I walked into the primary bedroom.

I took a right-hand turn to view the wall opposite the bed and it felt like I got thumped on the head.

They had copied and pasted the exact same fireplace wall and shelving composition from the living room directly into the bedroom.

If I stood in the right place, I could actually see both bookcases through the doorway of the primary suite.

It was so blatant that I did a double take.

Bedrooms are meant to feel different from living spaces.

One is public.

One is private.

One is where you host and entertain.

The other is where you retreat and turn the world off.

Repeating the exact same architectural gesture in both spaces erases that distinction.

Now the homeowner has to work twice as hard to make those rooms feel emotionally different. They have to decorate their way out of a design decision that never should have been made in the first place.

In any home, the design should set the homeowner up for success.

This one simply didn’t.

The lighting issues continued in the primary bathroom.

The vanity had LED kick lighting underneath it, which could have been a beautiful touch. But the floor tile was incredibly reflective. And the overhead lighting was closer to 5000K than 3000K, which made the entire room feel like an attack on the eyes.

As soon as I stepped inside, I noticed a bright strip of light reflecting directly across the floor.

You could see the entire LED extrusion line glowing back at you.

Good lighting should be indirect. Subtle. Ideally almost forgotten.

When lighting is done well, instead of noticing the fixture, you notice how the space feels.

Here, the lighting jumped right into your face.

The issue wasn’t complicated. Reflective tile and exposed lighting strips simply don’t belong together. Anyone thinking about glare control or material reflectivity would have caught it.

Instead, the room became another example of two design decisions colliding with each other because no one stopped to consider how they would interact.

And that seems to be the deeper issue with this house.

It’s clear that in the building of this home, it was believed that luxury meant scale.

Large rooms. Tall ceilings. Oversized gestures. A few shiny materials.

But real luxury is not scale.

Real luxury is anticipation.

Anticipating how someone steps into a home.

Anticipating how light interacts with materials.

Anticipating how people move through a space and how rooms should feel different from one another.

A well-designed home anticipates the human experience.

This house didn’t do that.

It was designed from spec sheets and concepts instead of bodies.

And the strange thing is that it will absolutely sell.

The location alone might guarantee it.

Someone will walk into that home and think it’s fabulous.

But I can almost guarantee that whoever moves in will slowly start renovating pieces of it.

They’ll add lighting everywhere first.

They’ll fix the entry.

They’ll redo the bathroom floor.

They may never be able to articulate what feels wrong, but they’ll sense it. Because the underlying issue isn’t just missing LEDs or a bad tile choice.

The underlying issue is that no one anticipated how the home would actually be lived in.

Real luxury requires anticipation.