A porous house - #174
Welcome in.
We’ve taken to leaving the front door open in the mornings. It’s on the leeward side of the house, facing the morning sun. As she rises, she pools into the entryway, warming the uneven steps outside and the broken terracotta inside. The dog comes in and out, and as a summer luxury, so do the cats. The child wobbles and toddles and makes his way into the untamable tiers of mountain mint that further consume the garden year after year.
Dash and Chego, familiars in these logs, sometimes pop into the kitchen or the bedroom to say hello, their humans making their own ways through the morning. In they come, out they go, cats on their tail, cats running like hell. It depends on the dog. The dog across the street (our own dog’s best friend) chased Finn and Link the other morning—one ran into the house and the other ran afar, needing to be consoled, cajoled, and corralled before he could eventually be carried inside. That is the risk of a porous house: you let things in to let things go.
Even with the door closed, the house is porous. The logs twist and crack, accommodating mice and bats, voles and vines. Through the gaps sneak the wind and snow. When the monsoons unleash, the front windows act as a cliffside waterfall, rain water pooling on the floor, towels at the ready. In the deepest winter on the brightest sun days, the sun fills the room, kissing every plant and pet, floorboard and face. It is a tropical paradise ten thousand feet up into the clouds.
While the south facing windows lend themselves to a vernacular architecture, there are two sets of french doors on the windward side of the house, and they sing all winter, whistling and jostling in their frames. Everything comes in, everything goes out. It is a porous house, and its friends are fewer and fewer.
Years ago now, I was meeting someone for a bike ride who was housesitting on Sunset Boulevard—and quite literally on Sunset. The house was mere meters from the road itself with continuous, roaring, four-lane traffic. Who would pay for a multimillion dollar house just to hear traffic all day? I thought, foolishly. Because of course they hadn’t. I walked into the house and you couldn’t hear a thing. The house was so well-insulated, the windows so preposterously thick that you could’ve been tucked in the deepest fields of the English countryside, privy to nothing and no one. The house was sealed like a vault, the lives inside immune to the ones out.
It wasn’t always like this—houses sealed tight, air scrubbed and filtered, windows locked against weather and sound. For the better part of our history, homes were porous by necessity. They breathed. Before central heating and air conditioning, airflow and sunlight were things we relied on to stay comfortable. Drafts slipped under doors and through floorboards. Summers meant sleeping on screened porches or cooking outside to avoid overheating the kitchen. The architecture really was vernacular; it was built in dialogue with the land, the wind, the sun. A home offer sanctuary from nature, but it also positioned you within it.
That began to change in the mid-twentieth century. After World War II, the suburban housing boom in the United States ushered in an era of speed and standardization. Homes were mass-produced with an eye toward efficiency, not a negotiation with place. Mechanical systems like furnaces, AC units, and electric ranges replaced the need for cross-breezes or porches. Rooms opened to each other inside, but closed off from the world outside. Comfort became controllable, and that control became the new design ethic.
By the 1980s and 90s, building codes emphasized energy efficiency, with double-paned windows, plastic vapor barriers, and insulation that muffled both sound and season. We stopped designing homes to work with nature and started designing them to keep nature out. Attached garages, automated climate control, and indoor entertainment systems meant we could live barefoot in snowstorms.
The outside world became an inconvenience. And so we closed the windows, paved the roads, and turned up the thermostat. The house became a sealed system.
As homes became more airtight, so did we. Neighbors disappeared behind drywall and driveways, and we would soon find ourselves opening the door more and more for boxes, less and less for the breeze. We stopped going out for what we needed. We outsourced our errands, minimized our movement, and built entire lives that never required leaving the house. The same instincts that once made us crave shelter now made us suspicious of exposure. The more our homes promised safety, the more we treated the world outside them as a threat.
Ironically, that’s when cabin culture surged, and biophilic design became trendy: eucalyptus branches in the bathroom, beads of wood piled on coffee tables, a stack of firewood next to a gas fireplace. We curated glimpses of the wild but kept them dusted, demeaned. The house became a stronghold. Nature became something to decorate with, not dwell alongside.
The ache remains though. Cabin porn, mountain retreats, the romance of the off-grid—all of it a fantasy of returning to something we didn’t realize we’d lost: friction, effort, proximity, sky.
Some people, instead of returning to those things, simply buy them. The average vacancy in the town over the ridge hovers around 50%. Half the homes sit blinds closed, beds empty. My heart aches when I see a home shuttered week after week. The air sitting stale inside, the warmth commodified and captured. I’m sure a tenacious mouse or two finds their way in, or I like to imagine they do. But they’ll find the cupboards empty.
Of course the mice here live precariously. There are, after all, three cats. When a mouse hasn’t learned the smell and learns it too late, we carry the body to a platform in the trees. The magpies pick up the delivery shortly thereafter. Nature shows her nature. The door is open. The blinds are up. The wind comes in as she pleases and I feel her play with my hair, lapping at my ankles to come outside. And I do, every day, again and again.
The porcupine lives in the wood shed and the bats live in the beams. Some neighbors pop in the front door, others through the screen door. In and out, the cats and the dogs, the mice and the men. It is a porous house.
When talking about my career with a friend this week, I was telling her how I was so happy not working for someone else, but spiraling up a new business by myself was weighing heavy on me.
“What if there’s a third way? Where you share the load? Where you let someone in?”
I thought of the logs. I thought of the breeze and the birdsong. I thought of this porous house nestled into the hillside, walls strong enough to hold us tight but permeable enough to offer shelter to the creatures it sat amongst. I thought of letting things in, letting other things go, and I went to sit on the threshold of the door, both inside and out.
For many years, I held my walls tall and my moat deep. Like many builders, I was not just protecting myself from what was outside, but hiding what was inside. Stone and concrete made a fortress of me so no one could see the whimsy inside. I was sealed, a controlled environment protected from what I had convinced myself I needed protecting from. How many knocks on the door I might’ve missed, hiding down in the basement with my caged whimsy.
I am better these days, dirt under foot and nail, held but not hidden from the elements. In the work it takes to live here, my breath has evened and my bones rarely rattle. Our lives here are entangled with the land. Summer is a relent, but she can still hammer home her point, hail and nail. Just yesterday I saw the first load of firewood being hauled in for the winter ahead, and I smiled.
I still hold the whimsy close, but I feel my grip loosening, wondering less and less what the world will do to the whimsy and instead wondering what she will do to it. Under the dust and the dirt, this house of logs is drawing a map for me, all routes leading to what I yearn for: not just a porous house, but a porous life, open and welcoming, curious and courageous, the doors open, the breeze dancing through.
I love your descriptions and connections to the outdoors, and I’m glad to have you in my inbox again. But I honestly have mixed feelings about the porosity. My dad’s cabin across the road from the early 1970s, where my brother lives, is charming and funky but too porous in my view. Dust from the dirt road floats in, flies buzz inside, mice are ever present, and it’s cold in winter. Our home is more airtight, and when the house shudders from the force of wind and snow storms, I’m grateful for the walls’ protection and the windows’ tight seals. Our cats don’t go outside because they’d kill birds or be killed by the coyote who shares space nearby. I’m grateful for screens on the windows that keep the flies out, and a deck where we sit and hang out to watch all the birds that nest in our eves. I guess you could say I’m an outdoorsy person who likes to go inside for some peace and calm—a break from the intense elements.
In Costa Rica, we got to know the owner of the ecolodge where we were staying, and they invited us over one night where we got to see their incredible home. It was made largely of bamboo materials and the incredible thing was that there were no fully enclosed external walls — just openings, some with slats or screens, no glass. No AC. The vibes? Immaculate. I feel like your lovely essay gets at some of the *why* for why this home was such a delight, blurring the lines between nature and home such that you can never forget you're IN IT and it's in you.
And about the word porous. I appreciated this reframe, having often felt that my emotional/psychological porosity (vulnerability to other people's opinions, critical feedback, etc.) was an immense vulnerability. I'll try and recapture it though next time this creeps up -- my porous nature a way of letting things breeze in and breeze out in time. That feels a lot better...