For the past fifty years the residential development industry has told us that we should think like consumers and make isolated decisions about our home based on momentary desires. But every choice you make is a design decision that contributes to our built environment. Every home and community is the physical result of that series of choices. These accidental choices from the past have created a present that we never intended; one that degrades the quality of our lives and harms our planet.

Imagine what your world would be like if it could be different.

It’s time to start thinking like a designer rather than like a consumer. You can take control of your home and start creating the kind of future you want.  Every choice you make, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, contributes to the design of this future.  Slow Home helps you make these decisions according to the principles of simple, light, and open. Our Design School offers the basic knowledge and skills you need to become a more informed residential consumer, empowering you to make smarter choices about where and how you live.

Learning about design is best done in an interactive studio environment. In fact, watching an expert demonstrate a particular principle or skill as you work on it yourself is a time honored tradition in architectural education. To facilitate this experience, our Design School takes its inspiration from demonstration cooking television. In the same way that Julia Child and others created broadcast versions of culinary school to demonstrate the basic skills and techniques of being a chef, we have created a web based platform to demonstrate the basic skills and techniques of being a residential architect.

The core of our site is the daily posting of a design exercise. Our goal is to provide you with a brief daily dose of architectural education that is informative, stimulating, and enjoyable. Each week we focus the set of exercises around a common theme or residence type. These range across the broad spectrum of housing and have included family homes, affordable starters, urban infills, empty nesters, and modest condominiums.

On Mondays, we evaluate a cookie cutter house plan in our What’s Wrong with This House? segment. On Tuesday and Wednesdays, we work through the concept design for a renovation to an existing house in our Design Project series. On Thursdays we focus in on a particular aspect of that project for our In Detail series and on Fridays we analyze an architecturally designed ‘real world’ home in our Case Study segment.  To learn more about the case study, and other examples of well designed houses you can also visit our Project Catalogue.  The weekly Slow Home Report, released each Sunday, is a wide ranging discussion of topics in the news, a review of viewer comments from the previous week and an introduction to the next set of exercises.

Although current economic circumstances may prevent you from making any dramatic changes at the moment, this situation is going to change and you need to start getting prepared.  Now is an ideal time to learn about the principles of good residential design so that you are ready to act when things do improve. For the first time in several generations we don’t have to accept the status quo as the only alternative for where and how we live. It’s time for you to learn how to think like a designer and start creating a home that fits the way you want to live.