The first house I ever designed, I designed on a fogged car window when I was nine years old.
Not on paper. Not with tools. With one finger on the glass, tracing the outline of the thing I could see in my head, a house with large windows and a fireplace and rooms that felt like they had been thought about by someone who cared what it felt like to be inside them.
The fog evaporated almost immediately.
I drew it again.
Three times, maybe four, on the same window, watching it disappear each time, drawing it again.
My mother turned from the front seat and said: stop drawing on the window, Miranda.
I said: okay.
I stopped drawing on the window.
I kept the house in my head.
That was thirty-one years ago and I still have it. Not the same house, not exactly, the version in my head has changed and grown and been revised through every building I have designed and every property I have developed in the years since.
But the original impulse, the nine-year-old’s finger on the fogged glass, the belief that a house could be made in a particular way for particular reasons, that the way it was made would determine how it felt to be inside it, that belief has been with me since I could articulate it, and before.
I am Miranda Holt. I am thirty-one years old. I was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the older daughter of parents who are not unkind people and who are not, in the ways that people are sometimes malicious, malicious.
They are people who made choices, consistently over thirty-one years, in one direction. The direction was toward my sister. Not dramatically.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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