Historic Homes & Black America
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. Your home, your space, has energy… is energy. Recognizing the pulse and cadence of a space has always been my first step when approaching design. When this is overlooked one makes rash decisions based on trends and what may be appealing to the eye. However, to truly evoke emotion in your space and to create a space that in turns gives to you, a mutual and honest conversation must occur. Conversation built on both parties exposing their truth, both in the glory and majesty of their identities as well as ugly wounds.
My profession calls for me to have these conversations with beautiful homes, but homes that represent a time and a life that have severe and negative memories for not only my ancestors but those in a community I hold so dear. Bringing voice to a conversation that so desperately must be explored is the only true path forward to uncover a future where the collective is heard.
I shared yesterday during a Instagram Live that I, having grown up in an old home, have always associated period architecture with what I deem ‘home’. My parents encouraged my appetite for architecture, and I vividly remember my mother touting my sister and I around to almost every ‘historic tour’ in the midwest. I was also equally taught to view these homes through the lens of my own heritage. Touring the Dana Thomas House remodeled by the famed Frank Llyod Wright, and my mother proudly adding to the tour guides script. She shared with the group that Dana Thomas was an activist in her own right and had sheltered Blacks during the race riots of 1908. Growing up in the land of Lincoln I was acutely aware of the racial history of our country. I carried these unsung stories like these with a sense of honor. It was my duty to not only learn, but then teach the beauty as well as the pain.
Our country has been built through a tapestry of both pain and beauty and by hands that are multi colored. For much of our history the narrative has been singular, reflecting only one voice. It is my hope that through my work, while on the surface may appear frivolous, can somehow purify and provide a reckoning for the disparity the runs far too deep. I often tell my clients that I am not simply ‘preserving the past’ but weaving their story into the tapestry of their home. It is my plight that through my acute awareness of the whispers still heard in the walls, voices who will never be named, hands that toiled in the dark hours of the night, that these homes are reborn.