Transcription of Maine Home + Design Show, #93
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Apothecary By Design; Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, Show #93, the Maine Home + Design Show. Airing for the first time on Sunday, June 23, 2013. Today’s guests include Ted Carter from Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes. Also, Rob Whitten from Whitten Architects.
I’d like to remind you again this week of two upcoming events, one of them happening today. The first event is Taste of the Nation Maine, which is occurring today, June 23, 2013, at Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport, Maine. The 8th Annual Taste of the Nation Maine at Wolfe’s Neck Farm will include food from more than 30 of Maine’s most well respected chefs. Spend the evening eating, drinking, and bidding on fantastic items at the live and silent auction.
The 2012 Taste of the Nation Maine event was sold out and it featured 2 dozen of the state’s top chefs on Great Diamond Island in Casco Bay. With the support of local chefs and restaurants, sponsors, donors and attendees, Share Our Strength raised a record amount of money and granted more than $150,000 to local beneficiaries whose mission it is to end hunger in Maine.
The second event is the Maine Home + Design Show, for which today’s radio hour has been named. This show takes place on June 29th and 30th in 2013, in Rockport, Maine. The Maine Home + Design Show will bring the pages of Maine Home + Design Magazine to life. The show features more than 150 exhibitors, the AIA Pavilion, and a pop-up gallery works from Art Collector Maine. Join us on June 29th and 30th for an experience like no other and feel as if you’re walking through a living version of the magazine.
For more information on the 2013 Taste of the Nation or the Maine Home + Design Show, visit themainemag.com.
They say home is where the heart is and, as often true, they are right. My home, my heart is in Maine. My heart is in Maine because it is where my children live and where my parents live. It is where I was raised and, in turn, where I have chosen to raise my own kids. There is no greater gift I could give them than the gift of family and a beautiful place to grow up. We are shaped by our surroundings, good or bad. We are shaped by those with whom we associated ourselves, good or bad.
While there are few perfect people or places in this world, there are people and places that help us stack the deck. When we embrace these people and places and call them ours, we become part of the landscape ourselves. Our hearts become woven into the fabric of our surroundings, part of the greater design. My heart has become woven into the fabric of Maine. We hope you enjoy our Maine Home + Design Show with Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes, and Rob Whitten of Whitten Architects. Thank you for joining us.
Lisa In the studio with us today we have one of my dear friends, Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and also a new friend. This is Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes. What I love is when we’re able to bring in people that I know and people that I don’t know and just sort of continue to create this interesting integrated world. So, thanks for coming in and talking to us today about, well, what you’re going to talk about, Biodynamics and how we bring this into landscaping and how we start to approach our lawns and our gardens in a more integrated way. Thanks for coming in.
Ted: Thank you so much, Lisa. I met Ben, it was almost like it was choreographed, in a sense, from the invisible world. I was talking to my co-author, Ellen Gunter. I said to Ellen, I said, “Ellen, I need to find somebody who works in Biodynamics. I feel like I’m this lonely soldier out here, no one to help me.” And, low and behold, I get an email in from Ben. It came in at the perfect opportune moment, as so often the invisible world lends that helping hand to us. So, I was thrilled when Bennett came into my life. He’s now building a beautiful Biodynamic garden for me with a great mason of his that he works with, Seth. I’m very, very grateful for that.
Lisa: Your book is “Reunion: How We Heal Our Broken Connection to the Earth”, and it’s actually in the process of being revised. I saw your new cover this morning. It looks beautiful. I can’t wait to read the next copy.
Ted: Thank you very much. The new book is “Earth Calling” and we’re going to republish the book but bring it more up to date. In 3 years time so much has changed about the world, and with Hurricane Sandy, and all of the different climate changes that have taken place, I think it’s a very timely and worthwhile book, but it will actually show people how they can really take charge and do things to make a difference on the planet.
Lisa: So, it’s not just the title of the book that will have changed, it’s also going to be a lot of updating of the materials inside.
Ted: It’s an expanded version of what I started with and Ellen Gunter, who’s a great writer, is really working very hard to make that happen.
Lisa: I do think it’s interesting that you talk about this thing sort of happening at the right time and for the right reasons. It’s this whole when the student is willing the master will appear, sort of thing.
Ted: Right.
Lisa: So, you yourself you said…Now Ben will cross the microphone as reacting as if maybe he’s not sure he’s happy to be called master at this point. You told me you had a barn full of some sort of special Biodynamics, I don’t know, cow manure or something like that that you imported from California or something?
Ted: Well, it was sort of ridiculous. It was through this contact I knew in California. I was out there on vacation. I said, well just ship me…I don’t know how many crates of it. It was several yards on several pallets and it was shipped across country and I’m sure it wasn’t ecologically friendly to do that. It had been in my barn for a couple of years. I had been waiting for the right moment to use it and Ben really opened that door for me. I just have limited time and it’s hard to integrate everything you want to integrate.
Lisa: So, you had a barn full of cow poop and along came Ben and this whole thing just began. So, Ben, what is Biodynamic landscaping? What’s the idea behind Biodynamics?
Bennett: Rudolph Steiner was the father of Biodynamics. He was a very brilliant man. He basically created 9 preparations that serve to enliven the soil and the plants that you’re growing. So, you use the 9 preparations basically to assimilate the cosmic forces into the material, or the soil and the plants.
Basically, you have 9 preparations. You have the horn-manure, the horn silica, the yarrow, the chamomile, the nettle, the oak bark, the dandelion, the Valerian, and the last is the horsetail. Five of them are compost preparations. The compost that we’re using in Ted’s garden is a Biodynamic compost. It’s made in a very specific way. The compost preparations are placed in a very specific part of the compost pile and it works homeopathically. It’s actually really a complicated thing that I don’t fully understand, but I believe that it works and brings the cosmic forces into the material.
Ted: We have to think about the fact that in the Winter time the earth is, in the Northern hemisphere, is inhaling. It’s inhalation, bringing the cosmic forces into the preps that have been buried in the ground. And in the Spring, it’s exhalation. It’s right now, the Northern hemisphere is exhaling and all this flora and fauna is coming to life and this lush growth is happening all around us. We have to look at the earth as really a living organism and it’s an intelligent system. It’s an intelligent system.
One of the things that…Every year I go to Carolyn Mason’s home in Chicago. She actually wrote the forward to my book. She’s become a very dear friend of mine and I said to her, “Nature teaches us abundance. It teaches us regeneration.” She said, “Well, Ted, that’s right.” She said, “But it also teaches us about balance and working with natural forces and not violating natural forces. And man has moved into a period right now where we are in violation of those forces with all of the different things we’re doing with our food, and growing our food, and things like that.” The GMO’s and we are just really going beyond where, I believe, we should be going and I don’t think it will play out well in the long term.
Lisa: Well, it’s interesting. As you’re talking about this idea of cosmic forces and the earth breathing in and out. I mean, this is also something that they talk about…Whether you’re talking about a Chinese approach with the Yin and the Yang, and the Yin time of the year being the Winter, and the Yang being the Summer, and the outward going energy of the Summer, the inward pulling energy of the Winter. I mean, they have this in other…Actually, I think Native Americans have similar ideas about nature.
So, we have this in indigenous populations and cultures all over the world and we’ve become so urbanized that maybe we have thought that we could get beyond what the earth just continues to do naturally, but now we’re having to pull back and just recognize that, yeah, the trees are going to keep growing a certain way, the soil is going to keep needing what it needs, people are going to keep needing what they need. So, if we do over-grow or over-harvest, then we’re going to go too far in one direction and we’re probably going to have to go a little bit further in the other direction to come back to center.
Ted: Well, our soil is starving right now. When you consume the food that we’re producing now…And Steiner predicted this anyway, when we got into industrial agriculture. Basically, the nutrition in the food is derived from the soils and our soils are basically inert at this point. They don’t sustain life without chemical input. Biodynamics is completely opposite from that. It totally, totally…Now, we’re getting into gene splicing and GMO’s and everything like that. These types of things, we’re impregnating human cells in certain types of fruits and vegetables now to experiment with that. That whole thing is so disgusting to me that I can’t even begin to comprehend what they’re trying to do here.
Lisa: So, all of these preps, Ben, that you were talking about. These are all, yarrow and nettle, these are all plants…
Bennett: Correct.
Lisa: The preps that you’re talking about, for people who don’t have very green thumbs. My thumbs are not particularly green, but I did recognize a lot of those because some of them are herbs that we use in medicine, in traditional Chinese medicine. These are plants that they’re using, you’re using, to heal the earth.
Bennett: That is correct. Yarrow, for example, is categorized as a dynamic accumulator because it’s root system is able to pull nutrients from deep in the soil, bring them into the plant, and that plant then used in your compost works to make those nutrients available to the plants you grow to eat. And then, hence, you the human that grows the food will be able to inject that food, or those nutrients through your food. It’s a more complex system that…Basically, the soil that we grow our food in, it needs to be alive. One gram of living soil contains billions of organisms. Those organisms work symbiotically with the plants to produce complex proteins that food grown in more of a mechanical or modern way doesn’t really produce the same quality food.
Lisa: Would this be something like hydroponics where they’re…
Bennett: Well, hydroponics…Plants feed two ways. Really, they should feed through their micro hairs, but when you feed plants a water soluble source of nutrient, they start to feed through their water uptake roots. Plants have two root systems. They have water uptake roots, which are bigger, and then they have finer roots which are micro hairs. When plants feed in humus, they feed more through the micro hairs. When they do that, they can produce more complex proteins which are more healthy for us.
Lisa: So, hydroponics would be more, just in the water, their roots are sort of absorbing some of the things they need, but not all.
Bennett: It’s a good system and it works great in urban environments, especially in areas where we can’t grow in the Winter time. So, I think hydroponics is a great system, but it’s not going to produce as high a quality food as you’re going to produce in the soil.
Lisa: This is something that I think Ted, you’re working with Ben, because I’ve seen on Facebook you’re posting your pictures of the landscaping that you’re doing, and some of this has to do with actually food. You’re actually going to incorporate growing of food into the landscape, which is something that maybe we’ve gotten away with, that everything has to be ornamental and beautiful and pretty, but it can’t be actually functional.
Ted: That’s right. And that’s what’s so exciting. I mean, I spent my life in ornamental horticulture. That is my life. The exciting thing about what Ben’s doing…It all sort of crystallized when we wrote the first book, “Reunion” and about how we are going to need to start to learn how to take care of ourselves and feed ourselves on this planet. With climate change that’s upon us now and things are not as reliable. Things are breaking down to some degree because we are not working in union with nature anymore. We’re working against nature, and against our very nature.
So, what Ben’s providing is educating people on how to grow their own food and it can be beautiful. This garden that we’re building is going to be absolutely a paradise. It’s a sanctuary. You walk inside it, it’s got granite curbing all around through it. It’s really beautifully structured. Ben can talk about it too. The flow forms going in. It’s just very exciting. I’m just very excited about the whole thing.
Lisa: Which is great because you spend all your life making beautiful, functional things for other people, and now you’re having one created for yourself in your own space.
Ted: Well, I’m always the shoemakers children. I always have half finished projects around my place. My fire pit’s half finished, my terrace is half finished.
Bennett: We’re going to finish this one.
Ted: But, I’m going to get my garden finished. Ben’s going to make sure of that. So, I’m very excited. I at least get something that starts from beginning and ends it. It’s very exciting.
Lisa: We’ll return to our program in a moment. On the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we’ve long understood the important link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the subject is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: Annuals versus perennials. We don’t make predictions or try to time the market. We do, however, like to buy when things are cheap, collect income when it is abundant, and harvest when the crop is ripe. And, most importantly, we like to diversify. In our garden, we like to have annuals and perennials.
It’s coming up on 365 days since the last real market correction and the height makes me nervous. At today’s market levels, some people will begin to look for the opportunity to lock in long-term capital gain rates. For those who don’t know, this means that a person in a higher tax bracket stands to keep more of what they make just because of how long they held it. In other words, it’s an annual crop. Last year’s bottom was somewhere between May 18th and June 1st for the markets most of us track.
There are, however, some markets that behave more like perennials. We own them because they come back and provide value to us consistently year after year. Hopefully your garden and your portfolio are full of some of each. The trick is understanding how to trim back the perennials and re-seed the annuals.
To learn more, send us an email to Tom at Shepard Financial Maine. We’ll help you with the weeds.
Speaker 1: Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial.
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Lisa: How can people approach this Biodynamic idea? Ideally, Ben, they would hire you and they would call you up at your company, at Wheelwright, and get you to come in and do their sort of work for them. But, how, if you were just your average person out there trying to do some gardening and incorporate some techniques to create healthier soil, what are some of the things you could suggest to them?
Bennett: I would suggest that they have a compost pile. That they use their scraps or yard waste, food scraps, and they make a compost pile and utilize that waste to add some life back to the soil. You don’t have to do Biodynamics. Biodynamics is really making compost and using compost preparations in a very advanced way. But, just using compost in general is a really good practice for the average urban grower.
Lisa: Are there specific things that people need to think about when composting? I know some people talk about you could use brown paper, possible you could use newspaper, some people say don’t use animal scraps. What are some of the things that people need to think about with composting?
Bennett: They need to have a good balance between carbon rich and nitrogen rich materials. Anything that you wouldn’t want to put in your body, you probably wouldn’t want to compost. Animal byproducts tend to attract critters, so you probably want to stay away from that unless you have an enclosed composting bin. But if you have an enclosed bin, you can definitely compost pretty much any organic material.
Lisa: It is fascinating to me because I just spent some time in a place that had a big golf course. I was at a resort, had a big golf course. Beautiful, green, and I’m thinking to myself, “Well, this is lovely. And I’m wondering what kind of chemical runoff we’re experiencing.” I know there are some golf courses that really do want to make things green. You spent 11 years as a golf instructor working on these types of golf courses. Did this influence your desire to get back to a more natural…
Bennett: Holistic, natural lifestyle? I’ve really enjoyed being in green spaces so that’s why I gravitated towards golf and I also like sports. So, I think that’s why I got into golf. Really, the chemical side of the golf industry, it’s always frustrated me because I know that you don’t really need that. It’s really our desire for perfection that drives that industry. If people were okay with seeing a little brown patch here or there on the golf course, you really could do things more organically and you wouldn’t need those chemical inputs. It really comes down to what the client…What the general population wants. Do they want a lawn that’s perfect or are they okay with something that is more natural? If you’re okay with that, then you can really do things organically and still have a really nice result.
Lisa: Ted, how does this all fit in with the revision of your book? The book that is now titled…
Ted: It’s entitle, “Earth Calling. A Handbook on Climate Change for the 21st Century.” It really is a handbook. In fact, the reason we have the subtitle, a handbook, because we found ourselves using “Reunion”, the first publication, as a handbook. I would go back and reference different pages and I said to Ellen one day, my co-author who is an incredible writer, I said to her, “Ellen, you know, this is a handbook. Even though it’s a text, it’s really a handbook.” And then we started to think about it in terms of climate change and saying people can reference this. There’s a huge, huge section of this book about hundreds of things people an do to help with this global climate change problem we’re in.
Lisa: So, a lot of the things that Ben has been talking about as far as incorporating Biodynamics, you will address in the book that you are now revising.
Ted: It’s part of the book. It’s not certainly the whole thing. And certain people aren’t going to go there in certain ways. I mean, I drive a couple cars and they’re not particularly fuel efficient, but I like them. I’m not going to go there, but I’m going to go there in other areas. So, people will pick and choose. It’s not either, or. It’s and, and both. I’m a product of the 1950’s. I was born in the 50’s. When I look at my nieces and nephews, their worldview…They were born into a completely different era, completely different world3view.
Lisa: Ted, I think your point is a good one and it’s very easy for those of us who are really sensitive to this and really want to do what’s best for the planet, and for our families, our children, ourselves, the future generations. It’s easy for us to start feeling very guilty. If we want to go visit a foreign country we actually have to get on a plane. We can’t paddle across the ocean in a canoe. I think this type of thing can become a bit of a problem if there is this absolute approach to life. If you don’t do this, then you’re bad. If you’re not a extremist foodie who eats only a certain type of food, then you’re somehow not…I don’t know, you’re like an evil plant mongering, I don’t know, villain. But I mean I think that what you’re trying to talk about is, you’re just trying to do the best you can.
Ted: It’s all we can do. Look, everybody’s sensibility is different. My sensibility is different than my brother’s sensibility, is different than my neighbor’s sensibility. We all have to work together as a team. If you do 1 through 5, I do 5 through 10, Ben does 10 through 20. We all work together collectively as a system to make a huge impact on this planet. It’s not about us going and living in a tepee somewhere and starting a fire every morning. That’s not where we’re supposed to be going right now.
Lisa: Ultimately, some of the things that we used to do that seem like they are simpler and maybe they were a better way, they used to get us into trouble. Lighthouse keepers used to make the light appear using mercury and then they would get mercury poisoning and they would go crazy and then they would die. So, there are these things that used to be good because now we use electricity and then we used mercury. It seemed like a good idea, but everything has its consequence. So, if we can just understand that simpler, it wasn’t necessarily better, and it’s not even necessarily better now. Again, just trying to be mindful. Just showing up and doing the best we can trying to be mindful.
Ted: Mindful. I love that word, yet.
Lisa: So, as individuals who are both dealing with what you have called the cosmic energies, there must be some shift in the way that you’ve lived your lives.
Bennett: Yeah. For me, personally, spending time in the Amazon and reading about Biodynamics really changed me. It made me more conscious of my decisions and how they affected me from a health standpoint, and also from a happiness standpoint. I think, for me personally, it’s always been a battle between doing what I love and making enough money to exist in this society. So, I really feel like if you can find that balance it’s a comfortable feeling and I’ve sort of found that balance with doing my landscaping business.
Lisa: I think that’s a balance that a lot of people are attempting to achieve.
Bennett: It’s not an easy balance to achieve because we spend a lot of our waking hours trying to make money and a lot of people are doing things that they don’t enjoy doing and they have to do it because they have a family and they have to feed their children. It’s a difficult balance.
Lisa: But how has it changed you as a person?
Bennett: As a person, it’s really made me more of a happy person and a more content person. For me, when I work in the landscape it provides me with a therapy. When I get in the landscape I’m thinking about nothing other than what I’m doing at the time and it’s enabled me to stay more in the moment and not worried about the future or all the mistakes I made in the past.
Lisa: How would you answer that same question, Ted?
Ted: Well, I think in a nutshell, what Ben’s talking about is very important for everybody. We have job. We start out in the life of a job, we move into a career. In your case, it was working with golf courses and being involved in golf.
Bennett: Mmhmm (affirmative).
Ted: That became a career for you. But you were called on a higher vibrational level to work with this work. This is where…Interestingly, that’s where I am in my life. I’m in the calling part of my life. So, that’s why I like the title, “Earth Calling.”
Lisa: So, this has actually caused you to evaluate what you are actually offering back to the world?
Ted: Yeah. We all know we’re terminal vessels here. At the end of the day, I don’t know many eulogies I’ve attended where they said, well…They listed off all the materials things that they owned and all that kind of thing. It really was, what did they give back? They’re always remembered for their generosity and how they helped one another, helped the planet, gave to a cause, worked for a cause. That’s the summation of a life well lived and that’s definitely where we all need to be on this planet. We are born to work and help people. We are happiest when we’re reaching out and trying to fix a problem or help someone in need or just do the right thing. It’s part of who we are.
Lisa: Ben, did you also find this? You spent three years in Central and South America working, it sound like in private equity…
Bennett: Yeah, I worked in South America. It was actually quite disturbing for me to be there because when you spend any time in Central or South America in the cities, you start to realize how big of an impact you really have on other people’s lives. A lot of the habits that Westerners have, have a direct influence on the lifestyle of people that maybe aren’t so fortunate. So, you start to see that and you start to realize that each one of us can make a big difference, we just have to be that difference. So, for me, it sort of woke me up. Ted’s book is a wonderful book for people that want to get awakened because it gives them the tools and the resources to look deeper.
Lisa: After listening to this, I’m sure that people will want to get in touch with either one of, or both of you, about Biodynamics landscaping or landscaping in general. So, how can people do that?
Bennett: They can do it through my Facebook page, Wheelwright Landscapes, or they could email at bennettwheelwrightlandscapes.com.
Ted: Or just tedcarterinspiredlandscapes.com.
Lisa: Well, it has been a true pleasure to spend time with the two of you today. I always enjoy being with…Well, I enjoy being with all types of individuals, but when like minded individuals who are doing things in slightly different fields, when we all come together I feel like it creates this amazing energy and I give you great credit for continuing to bring life back into the earth and the soil of the state of Maine.
We’ve been talking with Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes and Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ted: Thank you very much.
Bennett: Thank you very much, Lisa.
Lisa: We on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast hope that our listeners enjoy their own work lives to the same extent we do and fully embrace every day. As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: I love home shows, it’s true. Walking the aisles, talking with vendors, looking at new products and designs. It always inspires me to keep my house in order, to add new things or to remove clutter, all to make my home a comfortable haven for my family and a welcoming place to entertain friends. It’s one of those things that I never get tired of doing.
Of course, like most, when I visit a home show I have to put things in perspective. The “nice to have” or “need to have” list. If I didn’t, life at my home would be a little chaotic because we would be in constant state of flux and our budget would be stretched. It strikes me when I am wondering home shows, how keeping my house in order relates so well with business finances. It may sound like an obvious point, but if business owners don’t keep their financial houses in order because they’re too busy to focus or not as skilled as they should be, things can quickly spiral out of control and become chaotic.
At Booth, we see ourselves as financial partners. We are here to keep businesses running smoothly because we keep the financial house in order, while our clients do what they do best, run their businesses. Let us help you get your financial house in order.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
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Lisa: I have always understood the importance of space, myself personally, and even as a physician spending time in spaces that can be more or less healing for my patients and for their families. So, I’ve enjoyed getting to know people who really know something about space and how to design spaces to create a healing atmosphere or a place in which people really enjoy living. And one of these people is here with me today. This is Rob Whitten of Whitten Architects here in Portland, Maine, who is a long time supporter of Maine Home Design and will be at the Maine Home Show coming up here in June. I appreciate your coming in and talking to us.
Rob: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Lisa: Now, Rob, Architects. These are people that are very highly skilled, lots of training, and sometimes there’s a misconception that they’re only for people who have a lot of money that are going to build a really big house.
Rob: Right, and it’s a misconception I like to dispel as soon as possible. I answer all calls. I go out and visit lots of folks, have lots of opportunities, and I think of myself as sort of an ambassador for architecture sometimes because I’m not a terribly complicated person, I try not to use jargon, and I try to put things in terms everyone can understand. I think those of limited resources really need to make the most of them and I think an architect can be very helpful there.
Lisa: Why did you decide to become an architect?
Rob: I loved building things, I saw the world in perspective. I remember doing a drawing in the Second Grade that everybody was very excited about and I thought, “Nothing special. It’s the way I see the world.” It just came to be my calling from the very beginning. I feel very fortunate to have found it and stayed with it and will continue to practice until I have a diminished capacity because it’s just a terrific…They say it’s an old man’s game and I agree because you get more and more experience and you see more and more spaces and you interact with more and more people. So, it’s a good way to continue to learn.
Lisa: In this day and age, we seem to have a lot of do-it-yourselfers and there’s a lot of ability to go to, I don’t know, a major box store, I won’t even use a name, and just create structures whether they’re inside a house or even the houses themselves. This can be both good and bad.
Rob: Right. I think if you’re a good planner and you’re organized, you can use resources from big box stores pretty effectively. But, if you’re just wondering around and you don’t really consider the full consequences of what you purchased, and how it will be used, and how it will effect the space, it may not be the most successful purchase. I tell people it’s much more reasonable to consider your design options on paper than to build a wall and decide maybe it’s not quite in the right spot. We see that fairly frequently in the do-it-yourself world. There is a learning curve, but it can be kind of an expensive curve.
Lisa: What type of training does an architect have?
Rob: There are a couple of different paths. I have a 4 year undergraduate degree, and then I had a 3 year graduate degree, and then you serve a 3 year apprenticeship under a licensed architect fulfilling a series of requirements, and then you go through a series of tests. Then you would become a licensed architect and your license is renewed every year, and you have continuing education requirements throughout your life as a practitioner to keep you current with new codes, new materials, new methodologies, and evolving ways of doing things. For example, the whole green sustainable design movement is a very positive movement and I think it really serves everyone very well and results in healthier, better living spaces, but there’s just a tremendous amount of new information to stay current on.
Lisa: It sounds as though it’s similar to the path that one takes to become a doctor, where you have your undergraduate education, you have graduate education, and then you have to keep learning. It’s not something that you become something and then you are that.
Rob: I agree. It’s called a practice for a good reason and we’re practitioners. We need people to work with all the time. I’m sure in your line of work you have good patients and maybe not so good patients. Well, we have the same experience. So, we always try to make the most of the resources available and that also includes our client, or client base, or their site, or perhaps it’s a renovation of a structure we’re being given an opportunity to work with.
Lisa: What are some of the things that you think about and some of the questions that you ask when you have somebody that comes to you and says, “Rob, I’d like to work with you as an architect or I’m considering hiring you as an architect”?
Rob: I start with a site. It’s the biggest, most important component of any design. It’s where you are on the face of the earth, it’s where the wind comes from, it’s where the sun comes from, it’s the views you might have, it’s natural features. The better you understand the site, the more you can make the most of it’s assets.
Second thing, of course, is if you’re dealing with an existing structure you need to understand it. But you can change that structure.
So, I really like to meet a potential client on-site, see the world through their eyes, find out why they like the site, why they’ve chosen this site, and what they really want to do with both the site and if it’s a renovation the structure we’re dealing with, or a new house. And at the same time, I think there’s a nice balance between the site which is the natural environment, and the structure we’re designing which would be the built environment. And the two can really compliment each other and I think that’s a very important discussion to have. I think that starts to help people understand the perspective that an architect has as he starts to work with a client.
Lisa: What about the types of things that people want to do? Say you have a family with young children versus an older couple that just wants to be on one level versus a couple that entertains a lot. I mean, how do you get to know people well enough so that you can guide them in a way that makes sense for their lifestyle?
Rob: Yeah, and lifestyle is just the word I was going to use. Lifestyle describes where you are in your life and in your family situation. We are trained and we have worked in a variety of circumstances. So, if someone has a toddler, they see the world as an enormous threat to this toddler. We understand that that’s only going to happen for about another year. Once the child discovers the edge, maybe it goes over it once or twice, we don’t have to worry about the edge as much. And if you let that toddler rule, you’ll have possibly a compromised house that may become an impediment to everyone else to enjoy.
Similarly, an older person, you really want to create a lifetime house for that person so they can continue to age in place and really work with the house and have the house really comfort and support and protect them. Universal Design is a really nice concept and it’s really more of a European concept where it’s not about designing for distinct disabilities or handicaps, it’s just saying there are some very good standards one should apply so that one can continue to live in a home, even as you become impaired or start to decline.
Lisa: Do you ever run into challenges when people…You can sort of see what’s probably going to happen for them, but they are very much stuck in where they perceive themselves to be.
Rob: Well, I think of myself as a coach sometimes. Where, you’ve been here before, you know the situation, and you just have to help them begin to understand perhaps what they’re asking for or, I think, if they’ve come to you for your expertise and you think they’re making a mistake, you owe it to them to let them know what you really think and you have to be very direct.
Obviously, do it politely and in a very civil kind of a way and in an educational spirit, but if they’re making a mistake, you really have to say…And you can play it out. You can say, “Well, you know, that’s an interesting position for a window to be in. You’ll have this lovely view, but you’re just going to look right at the meeting rail of that window and it will be an impediment. Or, maybe you’re just tall enough to look over it, but your partner is 5 foot 3. It’s not going to be well received.”
Again, that’s the kind of thing where carpenter trimming and opening in a wall, I’m worried about where all these pieces are going to end up in the final product. That’s something a home owner will only come to realize once it’s in place, once it’s installed, and perhaps if it’s a problem. If it’s not a problem, they will never know about it.
So, if you come to our office you’ll see little tape marks on the walls all over the place and those are where we’re studying the relationship of the size and height of our client, both sitting and standing, the view, and the window system we’re working with. Just trying to make sure it’s going to be a good fit for that client.
Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: Many times when I’m working with a client in nature and in their land and landscape, I will make them acutely aware of the directions and what the power of those directions really mean. We are north base society. We live in North America. We are very head based, we have a very head based energy. It’s a place of the white buffalo, it’s a place of wisdom, but it also is a place of great conflict.
The South is a place of child, the place of innocence, trust, love, understanding. Hence, you have South America. Those people are very emotional, they emote.
The East is all about new beginnings, about bringing new things into our lives. It’s a wonderful direction because it’s all about hope and promise.
Then you have the West, which is really about moving into the darkness and really it’s the most powerful direction of all. It really invokes a sense of, perhaps, a little sense of intimidation and fear, trepidation and fear, but we always end up coming back up to the East again. So, it’s a full cycle.
You can honor these directions in your landscape and really call attention to these places and really try to understand how powerful these directions really are.
I’m Ted Carter and if you would like to contact me, I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth Maine. At Orthopedic Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree. With state of the art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendinitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information, visit orthocareme.com or call 207-781-9077.
Lisa: At the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we believe we are helping to build a better world with the help of many. We like to bring to you people who are examples of those building a better world in the areas of wellness, health, and fitness. To talk to you today about one of these, fitness, is Jim Greatorex, the President of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical. Here is Jim.
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Lisa: Was there anything in your training that assisted you in understanding how to deal with people? Because I suspect that you probably are in a situation often where you have more than one person that’s involved in the building process and you have to negotiate that.
Rob: Right. Sure. If we have two individuals it is nicer, I often find, to work with an older couple because they’ve worked a lot of these things out and they sort of have their give and take. Then you can just sort of, if you will, encourage the process to follow it’s natural course because they’ll end up with a good decision for themselves. Younger couples, perhaps, aren’t as skilled at that, so then it becomes a little bit more of a challenge. We never keep score. No one’s ever right. No one’s ever wrong. It’s just, we want to make sure it’s a good fit for them. It’s really their house and, again, we’ll give them quite a bit of latitude but if we think they’re making a mistake we’ll let them know. But, generally, given the right situation and the right circumstances and little bit of good coaching, they’ll make the right decision for them.
Lisa: Right, for them. And that is the important thing that you must have to keep in mind is that you’re always balancing out what you believe could be really important for them to know and what they believe that they really need or want.
Rob: Right. And back to the do-it-yourselfer, there’s just an enormous amount of information out there today and it’s readily accessible. When I started being an architect, all that information was sort of the purview of the architect or the manufacturer. I mean, there were very detailed sets of information. It wasn’t available to the public. Now everybody can access it and be very current. How they evaluate it and how they use it is really, again, it requires judgment and I’d like to think some professional skills.
Lisa: Which, again, I hear you in the same thing happening in medicine. That, we have this overabundance, some would say, of information. But information doesn’t always lead you in the right direction. It’s just information. It’s the ability to sort of tease out what is actually going to be practical that an architect can help somebody do, the same way that a doctor could help somebody with.
Rob: A client can have 10 great ideas. So, you’ve got 10 great ideas, but you know it’s a small house and maybe 3 is sufficient and maybe 10 will be pretty confused. So, it’s an editing process and it’s helping them prioritize. It’s helping them make, what I’ll call informed decisions. And that’s really gratifying. Most of all, towards the end of the project, as the house comes together, because being an architect I’ve had a sense of the spaces, the volumes, the flow of the house, the views, all of that. It’s all done on paper. In a sense, I’ve built it on paper. And then you see the client get so excited about, “Oh, this is so wonderful. I’ve got that view, and I’ve got this, and the light comes in this way.” And you’re thinking, “Yeah, that’s not new. That’s been planned from day one.” But you get to share that enthusiasm, which is really one of our great rewards.
Lisa: I’m sure you’re familiar with the studies that have revealed the healing nature of space. Where they put a wall in front of a patient or they put a pretty window in front of a patient and they see how long it takes for a patient to get better after surgery, for example. What are some of the things that you believe to really contribute to a positive, healthy home, and healthy lifestyle for your clients?
Rob: Well, we have 5 senses, some people would say more. I think a good home appeals to every one of those senses and somehow provides some feedback to that. So, there’s sound, there’s texture, there’s sight, there’s almost taste. You walk into a house that hasn’t been well maintained and you get that funny moldy smell and you think, “Eew” and it just puts you right off. So, there are many different senses that you want to enrich someone’s life with and I think you can incorporate those things in a house.
So, it can be the texture of a brick wall, or it can be the warm colors that change as the light changes from outside, or it can be having light from two directions coming into a room that gives the house cross ventilation, daylight that is colored by the time of day so you can tell exactly what time of day it it. And it also balances it so there’s not so much contrast, so then you can look outside. So it’s not this dark wall and this very bright window because you’re getting some other light on that wall. Those are very subtle.
Again, I think the Europeans have been part of this for a long time. They talk about this and it’s inherent in their culture and their tradition. They also build houses and homes and structures to last many lifetimes. They’re not in the sort of quick, turn it, 5 year flip cycle. I think it’s a little part of American culture. Our restless frontier part manifesting itself.
So, I think there’s a subtler and more profound appreciation of how those senses can provide comfort and health and really make for a, if you will, a more holistic house. I try to stay in touch with those things. Again, hopefully if you’ve hired an architect who respects all those things, he’ll get those things and your life will be enriched. It’s sort of a value added that I’m hoping we provide.
Lisa: Having been to your website myself, one of the most interesting things I found were the line drawings of the walking tours that you and your wife take on a fairly regular basis.
Rob: Yeah, I must admit, one of the disadvantages of being an architect in Maine in the Summer is the people with resources come here for the summer and they take my time.
So, I go on vacation the second week of September when people have gone back to their other worlds and we get away. It’s very low tech. We’re going at 3 miles and hour, 5 kilometers an hour, walking through the countryside. We have a detailed set of instructions and it’s usually across a walk that may be an old pilgrimage walk, or something to a significant monument, perhaps in the Middle Ages, and it just puts you in a different place in time.
I often think about how we have evolved to become walkers. Your senses, day 2 and day 3, you’re suddenly hearing things, seeing things, sensing things, that unless you’re moving slowing and deliberately and you’re in a different place, you’d never perceive. That’s really…And then I get to record them because I sketch and draw. My wife, who is a editor/publisher, writes.
So, we keep this log and some days she writes and leaves me a little spot for a drawing. Some days I draw and then she finds a little spot to put in a little queue about what it is. We’ve been doing this probably for 12-13 years now. So, we have these little series of log books. As you get older, your memory starts to fail. She’ll pull the log book out with the date and what actually transpired. Oh, yeah, that’s right, that’s right, that’s the town. So, we enjoy that and it also puts us in touch with different cultures.
Lisa: I encourage people to go to your website and to see these log books. They really are beautiful drawings and descriptions and they made me…I think one of them I was reading was in Italy and it made me want to go to Italy again. So, I think it will also cause people to want to meet you as a…I feel as if you’re a kind and gentle soul who is able to bring joy into the lives of the people that you design for and I think people should spend some time finding out more about you.
Rob: Thank you.
Lisa: So, we’ve been speaking with Rob Whitten from Whitten Architects here in Portland and I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Rob: It’s been a pleasure.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, Show #93, the Maine Home + Design Show. Our guests have included Ted Carter, Bennett Steele, and Rob Whitten. For more information on our guests, visit doctorlisa.org. For more information on the 2013 Taste of the Nation for the Maine Home + Design Show, visit themainemag.com.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle hoping that you have enjoyed our Maine Home + Design Show. Thank you for allowing me and us to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Apothecary By Design; Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our Executive Producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio Production and original music by John C. McCaine. Our Assistant Producer is Leanne Ouimet.
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