GLOBAL SENSIBILITY

We have visited all the continents, North America, South/Central America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, except Antarctica. We love adventure and have an insatiable need to be planning the next trip. We can't wait to share the world with our girls. There are so many places in the world to see and to experience, we hope our home will be set in that more global context.

We also have learned a tremendous amount about life from immersing ourselves in different cultures and we want our home to reflect that learning. So many of our "stories" are about people we have met and places we have been. So many of our travel companions are still our friends, including Sherpas from Nepal, guides from Kenya, hosts from Provence. We feel we are citizens of the world more than citizens of any particular country. We want our home to reflect this global awareness and sensibility. We want to role model cultural diversity and sensitivity. What that means might be no copper that looks beautiful here but is toxic to the environment and strip-mined in someone else's backyard. It also means no tropical woods or other materials or furnishings for which someone else has paid dearly (child labor or workers having to be blood tested for toxins) or for which the chain of custody is uncertain (example woods must be FSC certified).

We would love to find a way to have subtle reminders of different places, stories and experiences we have had around the world. For example, Paul bought a hat off the top of a guy's head in Bhutan. That is a far more interesting piece of "art" for us than buying the latest trendy artist about whom we know little.

Our focus on travel reflects a broader intellectual curiosity and perpetual desire to learn, innovate, adopt and adapt on a continuous basis and we would love for our home to encourage that. Sitting still on a spinning planet is really what we are doing when we are home but it will be more like a musical interlude where we keep playing, rather than an intermission.

"I pushed open the heavy wooden doors of a 600 year old temple in Bhutan. For a moment I could see nothing. The fragrance of incense was overpowering. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dimness, I could make out the blur of painted figures on a wall. An immense statue of Buddha towered in front of me. Hot pink and yellow silk banners hung overhead. I could hear the flapping of the wings of birds in the rafters. Next to me a man kneeled, and in one fluid motion he bent over, his forehead to the floor. The wide cedar planks had been scrubbed so many times they were smooth and soft, and a sudden shaft of sunlight turned them to silver. Smoke from the incense made the light palpable. Slowly, a white feather drifted down. In the silence broken only by the rustle of a monk's robe, I stopped and listened. Up so high in the thin cold air of the Himalayan plateau, even the holy water had frozen in the stone basin. Time expanded as I looked around. It was the moment that justified thousands of miles of travel, when all my senses came alive as I drank in the scene. We can take the traveler's eye into our everyday environment. Imagine if you could transfer the intensity you feel in an exotic situation to the experience of first entering a room. Your heightened sense keys into the sounds and sights of a new place, and you become aware of how light hits the floor and shadows collect in the corner. You come to understand the soul of a space. It's all about learning to see." — Vincent Wolf

We use this quote because Bhutan is one of our favorite places in the world and this could have been written by us in terms of the sights, sounds, smells … a magical place, but the quote also captures the essence of this theme for us.