As a second year interior design student I usually find myself analyzing architectural elements such as positive and negative space, line, symmetry, etc. However, during the initial phases of design for My Garden, My Home, I find myself pondering the old vs. new and how they relate to each other. For example, take the standard ADA sink. Its typical 1990’s boxy shape is well known throughout the commercial industry. Its main purpose is to be functional for the user, but not much beyond that. Fortunately, the plumbing supply industry has come such a long way from JUST functional pieces. The new ADA sinks are beautiful!! They have curves and style and color, and just as important…. FUNCTIONALITY!! However, I must give credit where credit is due. Without the passing of time to be able to analyze the “old” sink, the “new” sink may not have been as easily accessible for the user resulting in just another fancy sink.

Part of the My Garden, My Home concept is renovating the resident’s rooms with an updated, homey aesthetic.  The design committee has spent many meetings and many hours trying to find the perfect blend of products and materials that will feel like “my home.”  Some might think that the tastes of couples new to the nursing home community might be Victorian or antique in some way.  You know, heavy, floral drapes and large prints and color from nature, large wing-back chairs with velvety upholstery sitting around coffee tables with lace doilies.  Does this sound like a nursing home?

It’s no secret that rural Kansas homes in the 19th century were designed in a style I call “Rural Formal.”  Rural Formal is the stripped down, easy Victorian that utilizes the formal layout of the Victorian plan organization coupled with sparse ornamentation for it’s aesthetic, but greets friends and neighbors at the back door rather than the front.  My Grandmother used to say, “If there’s a knock at the front door, it’s probably somebody we don’t know.”

I found a perfect example this weekend of Rural Formal while sorting old photographs my Grandmother had collected during her lifetime.  It’s a picture of the farmstead my great-great-grandfather had purchased from the railroad during the mid 1800’s and the house he built there.  You can see the delicate scrollwork and the turned porch rails that mimicked the city homes.  You can also see the straightforward formal layout of the interior echoed on the tall, thin wings of the exterior.  First floor public; second floor private; front door formal; back door friendly.  This house is obviously sitting in the middle of the great, wide-open Kansas prairie with not a tree in sight, yet here it stands with the same formality one might find on Main Street.

Now, that was the home of my great-great grandparents.  They are long since gone and so are my great-grandparents and so are the bulk of the children that were born and raised in this house (my Grandmother, for one).  But let me tell you of another style that was born shortly after this house was built:  modernism!

Not the glass and steel modernism that you probably first think of, but the modernism of open floor plans with rooms that were divided by use, not by walls; the lack of ornamentation and the use of “clean” lines.  The kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms you live in today were conceived 100 years ago in the early days of the industrial revolution.  Single floor plans, split levels and ranch styles were all born from modernism.

Sometimes designers make assumptions.  We base decisions on our own experiences.  What we need to do is ask more questions and listen carefully to the answers.  I think you’ll be surprised, more often that not, by what you hear.  That little old couple could have just spent the last 40 years living in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright! (…and he isn’t Victorian!)