21 Comments
Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

I want plants everywhere, a million plants, plants I don't recognize, plants I didn't even bring into my home. And a big fishtank that starts at ground level and ends at eye level, right next to a very comfortable chair for reading, and there are more comfortable chairs for my friends because they come over to read too, and they know where the tea is and where the wine is, and they just come in and we sit together and occasionally catch each other staring at the fish as they swim towards nothing. The kitchen is huge and has a couch in it so that people can sit comfortably and talk to me while I cook them dinner, and the dining table is always clean and is just the right size for us to sit and eat together, and there are books and fat orange bastard cats who are insistent about everything they feel. And sometimes, you are there visiting, and my heart is full.

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Feb 22, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

I've come to realize that I've spent too much time thinking about my dream house and also my sense of the dream is heavily influenced by my parents' collection of Sunset home improvement books.

Key elements: It's not just a house. It's a whole estate by the sea, with lovely gardens and woods with many many guest houses for my friends to come and stay as long as they liked, all tucked away in wooded corners for privacy but never more than a five minute walk from the main house (also, good wheelchair friendly paths for friends with mobility issues). An art barn with studio space for me, and woodworking space for my boyfriend, and space for people who want to hang out and make things (or just hang out). There's at least one gigantic hot tub in an apple orchard with a view of the sea. And a bath house with saunas and soaking tubs (one of the hallmarks of my dream estate is the really good bathing facilities for tall people who like hot water).

There's that mainstay of Sunset magazine's idea of west coast elegance: an indoor/outdoor kitchen and entertaining space (that doubles as a dance floor, of course).

The main house pretends to modesty. However, the kitchen is big enough to have a table while people can sit and chat while I cook. The stove is really fancy, six burners and two ovens, and dark blue enamel. Lots of clever built in storage and book cases, but somehow also enough walls for all of the art.

And then there is the folly that looks like a light house. The ground floor is a reading room with at least one fainting couch upholstered in blue green velvet, loads of quilts for coziness, a wood stove with a hearth tiled in sea colors, book cases, and a cabinet stocked with coffee and tea and cocoa supplies, and enough space for all of my favorite mugs. The top floor is just all windows and a comfortable place to sit and think and watch the sea.

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Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Tiny houses in a food forest, all inside a massive greenhouse/arcology.

Could be snowing outside, but we'll be warm, oxygenated, and well fed inside.

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Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

My dream home is 2 story with a central courtyard and outside walkways around and above the courtyard. A garden and fountain in the courtyard. Whitewashed walls and wooden beams, but still enough wall space for art works and hangings. And a library of course. And cool tile floors. An amazing kitchen. Just a little place. :D

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Feb 22, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

When I was a small I really wanted a... spherical revolving door? I feel like it was hamster-ball-ish but also provided egress in some type of way. The details escape me but the sphericity remains.

These days I mostly just want somewhere to neatly store all my goblin treasures (some of which I was just telling Gailey about) and sit near them and drink hot drinks and make pleased goblin noises. Oh also room for all my friends and loves and a garden with strawberries and tomatoes and an entire room just to keep snakes.

(AMAAAAL I had my emails off for your newsletter all this time?? how why does substack conspire against me. it’s ok tho I’m here now to shitpost at will)

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Feb 22, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

When in elementary school, I made a map of a house that was my dream house. It had libraries and stables and gardens and lots of room for a pack of dogs (a Newfoundland, a mastiff, a hound, a few retrievers, several mutts). And it was placed in a mysterious combination of sea and mountains and the desert landscape that I lived in. All impossible, all not focused on the current reality of just wanting a kitchen where more than two people can sit at a table and talk to me while I cook, and having at least one south-facing window to get natural light in for most of the day. ... As time went on I realized I was much less concerned with my House, than my neighborhood, and I dreamed of how, somehow, I could find a cul-de-sac somewhere where my many different friends from many different places in my life, might all land and life, so that we could all be together... And now, now I am lucky enough to have some great neighbors in our current neighborhood, and house that we modified a bit to make a bit more room for our growing family. It has a south facing window, and is surrounded by oaks that pelt acorns in the autumn, and a kitchen that is too small. But it is home. And I never though I would be a new englander, but I have been living in the Boston area for longer than I Iived in Tucson, or anywhere else for school and career. I think about going elsewhere -- but where?

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Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

Wow, do I feel that shift from the dream of the big stone house to the sunny room and tea. I used to picture my dream home in such detail - with lighted dinosaur dioramas (very tasteful they seemed to me) along the halls and water falling on stone in some notional interior courtyard. Now the dream is just a street somewhere where my family is happy all the friends and people I love are neighbors.

But in the spirit of the old dream: the place is warm and feels clean, with lots of comfortable arts-and-crafts furniture, and green things growing. Sunlight you can follow around the house through the day and windows placed to carry the breeze and the sound of chimes in spring and summer. There's a fireplace with big comfortable chairs turned just enough toward each other, and of course so many books (with, however improbably, space for all of them). Kids' drawings on the walls and various other creations scattered around (again, with improbable space for all of it). There's always something just baked and coffee and tea at the ready. Herbs drying from the ceiling, a root cellar. There's a music room that's also pleasant just to sit in, a game room with an amazing table and comfortable chairs, a workout room with two treadmills so that my much faster wife and I can run together, a woodshop, a place to write. There's a front porch with a swing out front and people passing by, and a deck from which you can see the stars. There are woods out back with a clean spring, and somehow also reliable public transit out front. There's a garden that starts neat by the kitchen and sprawls with increasing gentle chaos out into an orchard shading into food forest.

And possibly one or two lighted dinosaur dioramas. For the kids.

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Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

The large customised guest rooms were such a beautiful thought. I also loved the image of a sunny room with clean counters.

I have less a dream home than I do a dream neighbourhood!

My greatest dream is to have a shared community space with my dearest friends. I would love for this space to be filled with cozy couches, a kitchen, nooks for smaller conversations, and open spaces for dancing or board games.

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Feb 21, 2020Liked by Amal El-Mohtar

For me it was always more about the dream room, and the dream room always looked suspiciously like the Reading Room in the British Museum (but smaller). The most important factors were floor to ceiling bookshelves (which we have in our living room in Slovenia, so that's probably a factor) and relatively dim lighting. Now I would add plenty of surfaces, for the playing of games and the drinking of tea, and proper windows. Well-lit by day, comfortably dim by night!

As I've grown older, though, I've discovered the more important thing for me is the things in the room. I've moved around so much that spaces always feel a little transient, but things I can bring with me. For example, I have a perfectly sized little nook next to my desk where I put all of the many things I acquired from Clarion West and it always makes me happy to look at. :D

I promised you a honey anecdote: I'm a member of an online quiz league for which I occasionally write questions. Last month, I ran an SFF-themed series. One question asked the players to provide "Time War" given a picture of the cover with those words redacted. After the fact, one of the players said (I paraphrase) "I wasn't about to get that one wrong, because my wife wrote the introduction to The Honey Month." Talk about a small internet!

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I don't know if you watch Grand Designs, but I get a lot of my inspiration for dream houses from that show. There is a cantilevered shipping container (yes) house in Ireland, which is probably my favorite thing. But it wouldn't be my dream.

My dream used to be something like a gothic mansion, much like yours -- plenty of rooms for my friends, rooms for me and my whims, definitely swords and armor; these days I am drawn to the modern and airy, soaring designs that make me think that the house is about to take flight. And plenty of warmth, too -- fireplaces, sauna, hot tub. Can you tell I live in New England? :)

And of course, of course a library. And creaking doors. I have a very weird fondness for creaking doors, they make me feel all is good and right with the world. A creaky door on a dark evening is one of my strongest writing mood-setters, and of course my dream home would be a place to write.

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My dream home is a compound of two houses next to each other with a shared courtyard, garage, garden and yard. My spouse and I in one house, our best friends in the other. This house is full of hidden away spaces for a private moment - nooks and crannies abound. It's an old Victorian style house with a large porch off the back with a metal roof so I can listen to the rain. The interior is cozy, cluttered and comfortable. Rooms that are dark and cozy, perfect for lighting a fire and sipping a whisky, but also bright rooms full of light with plush rugs perfect for napping in a sunbeam on. There's a big, bright farmhouse kitchen with light that pours in. A gas stove, full refrigerator and copper pots hanging above a huge island. There's both a bar nook and a coffee nook. There's a large, two story library full of books and comfy chairs and lamps for reading - with a bay window of course. The bathroom has a tub that is deep and long enough for all of me to be submerged in (a challenge when you are 5'10"!) There are rooms for each of my different crafts - a room for fiber arts, for puzzles, for painting. A gym space that is flexible for yoga and weight lifting. A theater room and a music room make space for the other half of my soul, my sweet husband. No dream house of mine leaves him out. A beautiful, bountiful garden space outside where I can grow the flowers and foods that feed my soul. Where a lawn would be is wild with clover, feeding bees and providing ground cover that feeds the soil. There's a massive outdoor kitchen with grills and smokers and a pizza oven. And above all else, there are cozy places for cats to nap and play. This home has room for all the kitties I yearn to adopt. (My tiny place is too small for the three we have.)

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My mother gave me A Wrinkle in Time to read when I was seven, and ever since then my dream home has been the Murrys': an old New England farmhouse with a stone mudroom and a star-watching rock out back in a small town. Having spent plenty of time in Massachusetts over the years, I'm not so much a New England these days, but the house I imagined while reading L'Engle is still the center of my heart. I grew up in a log cabin in Mississippi, so drywall and linoleum were alien to me--that was how other people lived. The inside walls of my house were just the other side of the beams that made the outside walls. It felt more real to me than a wall that wasn't really a wall, but rather an envelope of plaster and siding screwed onto a hollow frame of two-by-fours. That probably had some influence on my love of the Murrys' house.

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