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FeedSlow Living
Architect Sarah Nettleton practices what she preaches
By Alecia Stevens
Photo by Susan Gilmore, Styled by David Anger
Originally a Yankee New Englander, Nettleton grew up with the philosophy of “living with what you have.” Surrounded by furniture of mixed periods, she was imbued from childhood with a deep appreciation for beauty, especially the beauty of an aging patina. She still lives with many of these same pieces. The rug in her office, for example, is a Kazak from her grandfather’s bedroom. Its weary and faded palette of plant-dyed wool yarns inspired the paint colors throughout her home. A fifteenth-century English oak bench—a gift from a friend whose family lived in Rome—serves as a coffee table. These and other pieces, like old friends with deeply abiding memories, fill her smallish (by today’s standards) 1,500-square-foot, 1942 home.
“My house was built during World War II, and is scaled, as many were, to the sense of wartime scarcity,” Nettleton says. She keenly understands its counterpart—the period of recent prosperity, which is also expressed in architecture and is not unlike the grand East Coast homes built during the turn of the past century. As a LEED-certified architect, Nettleton is concerned about environmental matters related to building and how we live in voluminous homes. Ultimately, she questions the choices we make to have “more than enough.” She ponders whether “bigger and more” are really satisfying. How sensual are those experiences? And what might be the benefit of a simple life? “I’m interested in architecture that begins with an experience, a sensate feeling,” she says. “As an architect, I like to work with emotion. I like it when a client says, ‘I want a sunny, delightful kitchen.’”
In addition to celebrating the senses, Nettleton wants a lifestyle that goes easy on the earth. She is convinced that these two desires are not mutually exclusive—in fact, she contends, the simple life bring us back to the delicious memories of childhood.
Photo b Susan Gilmore
Nettleton always considers the site when she plans a home (she offers landscape design services as part of her practice). “We spend too much time in virtual realities—watching other people live on TV—we don’t interact with the outdoors like we used to,” she says. She took particular care with the connection between the internal and external environments in her own home, adding French doors off the dining room that open gracefully to a terrace she designed—the perfect place for lingering on a starry summer night.
Since entertaining is one of her greatest pleasures, she also focused on flow. “I needed the indoors and outdoors to flow seamlessly, so that people could move in and out of the house,” she says. Guests can wander into the garden, designed as a circle with plants and trees providing a kind of formal embrace. The circle is repeated indoors with a round dining table. This also helps guide people through and around the small space.
Nettleton is passionate about how our choices inform the quality of our lives—taking the first salty bite of a just-plucked heirloom tomato drizzled with olive oil, detecting the scent of lilies as she sits on the terrace with morning coffee, or noticing for the hundredth time the many reds in the worn rug on the floor. She doesn’t mind wiping a bit of sweat off her brow on a still summer night sitting with friends on her porch. She takes none of it for granted. “Maybe if we could just show people how to live more simply, they would like it,” she muses. In the meantime, Sarah Nettleton will keep doing her part.
Alecia Stevens is a Minneapolis writer and interior designer.
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