From photos and floor plans, I could write about what makes Rafe's project special. I could describe colors and light, fixtures and finishes. However, when I visited this house and sat in the living room with Rafe, I was less inclined to ask him about the design process or the trim details than I was to be quiet - to experience the house rather than deconstruct it. The building disappeared, and ease and joy settled in.
I could easily spend my time in this house, not because of the floor plan or the trim, but because it just feels right. Great design, too is a special transmission, outside the blueprints, with no dependence on fixtures and materials. It's no surprise that the designers themselves often can't explain what makes their work great.

Brian Potolilo, Design Editor
Fine Home Building Summer 2016 Editors Note

Alexander Solzhenitsyn on government

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
The Gulag Archipelago (1973).
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974).
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.
In his interview with Joseph Pearce. "An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn." St. Austin Review 2 no. 2 (February, 2003)

David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.