Catherine Armsden

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Catherine Armsden

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Born
in The United States
June 03

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September 2015

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Catherine Armsden’s fascination with architecture was ignited during her childhood growing up among the weather-beaten houses of coastal Maine. Educated in New England, she moved in 1983 with her husband, Lewis Butler, to San Francisco, where they co-founded Butler Armsden Architects. Dream House is her debut novel.


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Catherine Armsden Dream House began with a bout of nostalgia when I was visiting my parents at the rented house in Maine where I grew up. For the sixty-one years they l…moreDream House began with a bout of nostalgia when I was visiting my parents at the rented house in Maine where I grew up. For the sixty-one years they lived in the house, my parents had wanted to buy it, but the landlord wouldn’t sell. The house was small and unremarkable, but sited in an extraordinary location overlooking a tranquil cove that opened to the ocean. That day, sitting on my childhood bed looking out the window, it occurred to me that soon, I would lose that exquisite view. I grabbed a notebook and began to write. What I discovered as I wrote was a deep longing for the qualities of my childhood landscape, 3000 miles from where I was living in San Francisco.

My nostalgia inspired the book’s main conflict: Gina, an architect of other peoples’ house dreams, is searching for home. Gaston Bachelard’s intriguing sentiment from The Poetics of Space, which opens Dream House, seemed to anticipate the story I would write:

"Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams."

When you’ve lived somewhere that’s captured your heart, you measure everywhere else you live against that place. I’ve been fascinated by what my residential architecture clients have wanted from their houses. Some are building a dream, a departure from what they’ve known, or an artistic statement; others are motivated by nostalgia for the past. Working with them, I’ve felt the immense power of houses. I began asking the questions that would inform the heart of the book: with a new house, do we start fresh or try to catch the essence of houses that were the containers of our first dreams and memories? How can we re-establish—with shape, color, light, scale, materials, landscape—the important sensory equilibrium we remember? Is it more satisfying to start over? What makes a house feel like home? Compelled by these questions about what our houses mean to us, I became determined to find the story that would allow me to explore them.(less)
Average rating: 3.59 · 259 ratings · 36 reviews · 2 distinct worksSimilar authors
Dream House

3.55 avg rating — 245 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions
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4.43 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 2023 — 3 editions
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Published on April 10, 2019 09:26

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