Fussell's right-- if you have the stomach to read through those florid, weekend real estate ads, you'll never find gushing descriptions of "houses," they're always "homes." These real estate ads really play up the emotional in their appeals for buyers, using words like 'prestige', 'lifestyle', and 'community'. Their slogans reflect these emotional ploys, too. There's Ryan Homes ("Welcoming Families Home For Over 50 Years"), Centex Homes ("For Everything Home Means), and Toll Brothers ("America's Luxury Home Builder"). What's ironic is that while the marketing departments of these developers stress the emotional aspects of home and family, the developers are actually building what Hugh Newell Jacobsen calls 'housing,' not 'homes.' Their 'homes' are identical, cookie- cutter, generic, sterile. When clients come in wanting to renovate or add onto these houses, they'll always say things like, "We're unique, but our house doesn't reflect that," or, "We want to take this cookie- cutter house and make it more 'us.'"

Enter the prolific, and profitable, businesses of shelter magazines and home- improvement television shows, which the inhabitants of these tract 'homes' turn to in order to personalize their abodes. These magazines and TV shows bank on the fact that a big chunk of us are "dreamers" when it comes to home renovation. What the glossy home and garden magazines sell is desire, according to author Marjorie Garber. The editor of House & Garden magazine puts it this way: "We love the voyeurism of going into somebody else's home." These magazines are "the eye candy of the (baby) boomer crowd" because they are addictive, and they give us "permission to be nosy."9 According to dwell magazine, there are over a hundred television programs, and several cable networks, expressly devoted to home renovation and redecoration. These shows are "the new staple of daytime TV," and "are not just about home improvement but about self- improvement, a form of mass therapy for people in search of confidence and comfort."10

Unlike their TV home show counterparts, the glossy shelter magazines almost never have people in their photographs. Why? Because, according to Architectural Digest's editor in chief, "When readers look at an interior, part of the enjoyment is actively projecting themselves into it. If...people are shown too prominently, it shuts the reader out."11 Instead, magazines prefer to allure you with perfection-- the rooms are waiting just for you. Our office has seen first- hand just to what extent these shelter magazines go to create fantasy. Not only do these magazines have photographers, writers, and editors on their staffs, but they also employ professionals known as "photo stylists." These are the people that set things up just so, tempting you to walk into that room, recline on that chaise lounge, dine at that perfectly set table (complete with china, food, and wine, of course). One shelter magazine we worked with routinely removes all of the homeowner's furnishings, and puts all new furniture into a house for the photo shoot. This furniture just happens to be manufactured by one of their major advertisers, and it's offered for sale after the photography session is complete. Even many architects, when they hire architectural photographers, routinely infuse reality with fantasy, taking out the homeowner's furniture, importing a moving van full of more photogenic furniture. The reality is that, in most mainstream publications, it's rare that you see the homeowner's actual belongings.

What's even more impressive than the way these shelter magazines try to seduce us is the way they have us all figured out. These magazines have taken economics, demographics, and psychology, and rolled them all together into an interesting concept they call "psychographics". Peter Lemos, the editor of Home magazine, explained it to us this way-- shelter magazines know that their readers aspire to the next rung or two up on the social and economic ladder than that to which they belong. These savvy editors know that people don't read publications that they think are at their level, but those at the level that they aspire to be a part of. The editors of Southern Living have confessed the same statistic-they are fully cognizant of the fact that the cost of the typical house featured on their pages is beyond the purchase price, and income range, of their average reader. It's just not as exciting to fanaticize about something that's easily- attainable. These shelter magazines, like decorating 'guru' Martha Stewart, have a finger on our "wanna- be" pulses. It's similar to what a recent Washington Post article said about The Woman We Love To Hate-what she's selling is "wish fulfillment and dreams.... She markets an unattainable image of perfection."12

While some people find the building programming, design, and construction process to be frustrating, for others it plays on their emotions in an entirely different way-it's totally exhilarating; it's, as one of our clients put it, "the most fun I've ever had." In fact, some people enjoy the process so much, that they take it to an extreme. They don't want a project to move on, and they get upset if it invariably begins culminating towards actual, physical construction. These types of people have more fun dreaming, and constantly revising that elusive dream of theirs. They don't want to commit to a final design, to be limited to only one physical embodiment of their fantasies and aspirations.