Go ahead. Pretend to try to resist falling head over heels in love with a new house whose name is Barnaby.

For real, and why not?

Communities get proper people names. Neighborhoods, too. Homes – mostly imposing structures down prosperous, long drives behind forbidding gates, or with slightly crooked wooden arrows nailed to trees on dirt roads that lead to lake or riverside bungalows – get a name.

Barnaby, mind you, is not the whole name of a Garman Homes’

Intention Matters – Intend To Be For A Customer

The operative terms you see in the revelations of the America At Home study underscore primal, unchanging truths. Shelters dating back 250,000 years have always been about benefits that nest essentially in five master buckets: safety, comfort, health, well-being, and identity.

We wrote here:

A smart, healthy, operationally-sound, high-performance, environmentally-friendlier sheltering haven—one where inhabitants preferably do not die, get sick, nor suffer harm, and don’t do so amid a relative feeling of well-being as their property-value meter runs—sounds just about right to ring in any new year. Bedrooms, a kitchen, bathrooms, living areas—they’re the essential kit-of-parts that make a house. What Slavik-Tsuyuki, Keenan, Sward, and Garman seized on—and why it affords a glimpse at the future of housing—is that it’s a merger of a home’s parts and the story of people who live there, striving to prosper, that makes up today’s biggest challenge in home design, engineering, construction, and real estate.

It’s only logical. Which is a more likely beacon of protection, of peace-of-mind, of relaxation and enjoyment, of wellness, an inanimate thing or a trusted person?

When we think of “smart homes,” what comes to mind is technological wizardry. But what smart homes really are are places that engage in the lives of those living their, and, together, weave their narrative of thriving, of being the person, or family, or household one aims to be.

The builder take-away here is, remember always, your credentials – the ability to put a new, vertical structure into a budding community – are your customers’ solutions.

Relate

The America At Home project, and the No Little Plans – Barnaby home underway now in Chatham Park, N.C., takes care – with digital home buying experience help from Cecilian Partners – to illuminate the job a home needs to do for its inhabitants in a “learning to live with Covid” era.

Barnaby is no faceless, nameless, uninvested, distant entity. Barnaby becomes a family’s companion, caregiver, respite, source of warmth, grace, light, and joy. Barnaby is one of the America At Home study’s purest discoveries. The nonfiction narrative of that family, that household, those people living in those four walls have a nameable, present, personified reference point for all they value.

Alaina Money-Garman writes:

I used to think of our home as our landing spot. Our rest between constant errands, endless practices, insistent appointments and frequent business trips. And then last year it became our full time backdrop. No longer the space in between all the places we would go. It became the space where we would stay. So we could be safe.

Unsurprisingly, over 7,000 respondents to the America at Home Study were thinking about safety too. About working from home. About school from home. About life from home. About all the ways they would need the space inside their home to transform and adapt to new responsibilities. A harder working kitchen. More thoughtful entries. The bar for homes had been irrevocably raised.

In too many cases, for too much of the time, builders develop, and design, and engineer, and build, and sell units to buyers.

Coronavirus – in nature and among people – stopped time. It was nature’s pause button. Builders, fortunately, rebooted fast and had streams of customers to sell to. The America At Home project strategists seized that moment in time to decipher and help shape housing’s future.

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