Architectural Approach: Creating House is Just Like Writing a Poem

Simply said, I design houses because I enjoy helping other people create comfortable living environments that are also well crafted. I design classical houses because I seek beauty in these environments. For some, beauty is an archaic and meaningless word. For me, it expresses an objective reality…truth. My journey as a luxury residential architects has been a long one, but a necessary one. I discovered early on that simply seeing and observing beautiful objects and buildings was not enough for me. Observing was not knowing. I needed to create beauty in order to know it.

Making a house is like writing a poem. Designing a house comes easily to me in the same way that writing a poem comes easily to Emily Dickinson or Pablo Neruda. All good houses are poems and all good poems convey truth in some manner. Like all good poems, good houses are transcendent. They point to something else¬¬-beauty, truth, love, even the divine. I needed to-and still need to-know these things through my work.

It seems absurd to suggest that absolute truth can be conveyed in a poem or a house. But it can. Beauty and truth can be conveyed in the right phrasing, the right proportions….even the right details. As Mies said, "God is in the Details." By that, I believe he meant that "beautiful" details are a metaphor for something archetypal, something in the unknown and invisible world that we all, as humans, know and understand collectively as true.

Beauty, like love, is in every human. That is why we recognize it when we see it. There is a collective consensus that such buildings as the Pantheon, the Parthenon, the Villa Rotunda, the Taj Mahal, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are all beautiful. There is also agreement that humbler buildings are beautiful: the classical Carengie libraries in small towns across America, Midwestern farmhouses, early twentieth-century suburban houses in Coral Gables or Santa Barbara, even small masterpieces like the post office at Seaside. These buildings and countless others show us the beauty in ourselves. We need to be around this beauty in order to be human at our highest level.

My journey, my path, my search for beauty as a residential architect in New Orleans has also been a search for self. Every new house reveals another aspect of self. Each house becomes another mirror of reality. Polishing the mirror reveals another layer of truth. Each house becomes another metaphor, another poem.

Ken Tate is an expert in designing custom houses, luxury residential architect and estates nationally.