Editorial
The Fold
Looking carefully at where people live. Old buildings and new instruments, measuring, plans and details, and the decisions that quietly determine whether a room works.
Your phone can measure a room. Here is what it still cannot do.
Scanning is genuinely good and genuinely limited. What a LiDAR scan gets right, the four things it misses, and the ten minutes of tape work that makes it trustworthy.
The island isn’t too large. The clearance is too small.
Kitchens fail in the gaps between things. The clearance numbers that decide it, the one everybody forgets, and the arithmetic that rules an island out before it is ever chosen.
The Cape Cod
Every feature is an answer to New England weather. Then it left New England, and the shape turned out to be what a small low-energy house wants anyway.
Why do old houses have windows above their doors?
The transom did two jobs the building could not do any other way. It lost both to newer technology, and both reasons are now quietly returning.
A measurement is not a location
You can measure every wall in a room and still be unable to draw it. The number almost everyone leaves out, and the one-afternoon habit that fixes it.
Four franchises open so far. The Fold runs on eight, and Before You Renovate, Details and Objects are still to start.