A LIVEABLE PLACE FOR ALL | KAREN KUBEY | Urbanist and Houser

I speak with Karen Kubey, who is an urbanist and ‘houser’ with an enduring passion and commitment to affordable housing as the generative factor in social equity and justice. We speak about the ways to engage residents in the decisions for the design of their homes, and the need to push for generous, transformative policies, because housing is a human right.

Transcript

A LIVEABLE PLACE FOR ALL

KAREN KUBEY | Urbanist and Hauser

S1 EPISODE 14: TRANSCRIPT    June 27, 2021

Karen

“We're so far from where we need to be. Housing should be a human right. We should just achieve that in this country.  And so, if you're asking what plagues me,  it's chipping away,  working at the margins. I think we must follow the lead of people who are pushing for transformative solutions that will result not just in slightly more affordable, slightly nicer, slightly, whatever. What we need is affordable, beautiful housing, green housing for all.  It's achievable and I think we need to push for nothing less than that.”

Nina

“I'm Nina Freedman, and this is Whereing. Whereing explores where we are. It is dedicated to those who believe in the inherent right of belonging, and all the ways we feel we belong, and connect to ourselves, to each other, and the spaces that hold the stories where all of this comes alive. Where each experience of belonging is a work of art, created by chance or by design. Dare I ask, is belonging where you are not what matters most? Whereing is the spatial story. Welcome.”

I am speaking today with Karen Kubey, who is an urbanist and houser, with an enduring commitment to affordable housing as the generator of social justice. She's the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture toward Social Equity, and has served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Karen co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity, now called Open Architecture, New York and co-founded and led the New Housing, New York design competition. She began her career as a designer of below market housing, teaches at Pratt Institute, Columbia university GSAPP, and was a fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon. 

Karen. Welcome. I'm curious how you got so interested in socially equitable design, and discovered that housing was the most direct route and intervention to achieve socially equitable design. So, how did it begin? Why you?

Karen

Yeah, well, that's a great question. I mean, I'm not sure where to start. We could start maybe at Berkeley, which is where I got my undergraduate degree. One thing we learned is that social justice is really at the center of design. And I remember  precisely, our very first class, Environmental Design 1, was taught by Randy Hester, and an early assignment that I remember very well was called ' the justice walk', where he took a lot of kids, a lot of us were from suburbs, a lot of us  weren't so worldly, and took us on a walk in Oakland going through different neighborhoods, different social economic levels, and examining through a particular lens, the public spaces there, the parks and things like that. And, noticing the differences in what the spaces for like how well they were funded, how well they were kept up and thinking about, who was welcomed, who was not, and how we could read that in the physical environment. So we saw very early injustices, specifically disparities in the built environment, even on a short walk, through different neighborhoods in Oakland.  We learned that that was really at the heart of what we were meant to do. So, I knew that somehow I wanted to address social justice through design and my career. Another thing I should mention is that,  one of our early projects was to redesign the center for independent living in Berkeley. It's a center for people with disabilities.  Berkeley was really at the forefront of advocacy, around people with disabilities. So again, from the beginning,  thinking through different kinds of public that we're designing for, thinking about different marginalized populations and how our work could make their lives better, and produce designs that were more inclusive and equitable. So, that was definitely on the brain. The move into housing was at first coincidental. I was 22 when I moved to New York, and very eager, signing up to volunteer for anything and everything at the Center for Architecture, which had just opened, and  like literally knocking on the door at the Architectural League. So, volunteering was really formative.  I feel very lucky that there are so many amazing organizations in New York and  architects working on housing and social justice issues here. Not only architects, but a huge range of people. So the move to housing was coincidental where an email went out.  They were looking for volunteers for jury day, for a competition called New Housing, New York, which was an ideas competition, co-sponsored by the city and AIA New York, which is housed at the Center for Architecture, an ideas competition for the future of affordable housing in New York. So long story short, I volunteered. I moved to New York for six months. That was 18 years ago. So, this is when I was just new here. I was not yet in grad school. I was not yet working in an architecture office, but basically,  I volunteered. I was supposed to be volunteering for a couple of hours. I ended up there all day, and I met some really important people who were working on that, including Mark Ginsberg of Curtis and Ginsberg Architects, who later became my boss, gave me my first job in architecture. And so Curtis and Ginsburg is a firm, then a small firm now, a big firm doing affordable housing and urban design. So when you ask why housing, of course, one can work on social justice issues through,  I believe any aspect of architecture, interior design or urban design. But, I'm very interested in housing because it's at the center of our lives, at the center of our economy, and it makes up literally the majority of the built environment in our neighborhoods. So, I don't think that I'll ever run out of work to do and interesting ideas to uncover, working on housing. My work isn't exclusively housing, but it's been at the center of my practice since then. 

Nina

Thanks for explaining that. You seem like such a new Yorker now in so many ways, just in terms of what you're involved with. There's a drive and a passion to what you're doing and getting involved with everything. Not quite as chill. So, one of the cornerstones of your advocacy work is in community and resident participation.  This is something that you really promote. This is something that you really believe in. I think you call it, 'people's voice in shaping their own environment'.  What I've always felt is that the questions that we need to ask before we design, are often not asked to the people that we need to address. And, it takes talking to a lot of people that are  not necessarily the most outspoken community member, because there are certain people that are involved in lots of things, and they are very often the voice, but they don't always represent the quiet voices, that maybe don't come to the table, or don't have time to come to the table.  So I'm wondering, how do we reach them?

Karen

Yeah. This is such an important question. You're making me think actually of an historical example. Someone turned me on to  Elizabeth Coit from the forties, who argued that it was critical to really talk with residents, when establishing standards for affordable housing design. She's looking actually in public housing. I'm thinking of that, and I'm thinking of a very recent example, Germane Barnes, who's part of the Reconstruction Show, has also done really important research talking directly with residents.  I'm answering your question first through a couple of examples, and then maybe I can talk about my own work. But, Elizabeth Coit was so interesting because she looked precisely at  what's actually happening in these different rooms in a house, and looking at, okay. The bedroom is not just for sleeping. Maybe work gets done there. All these different things happen in the bedroom, and also all these different things happen in the kitchen. Sometimes there aren't enough bedrooms. Sometimes someone ends up living in the living room. So, she catalogued very carefully, the actual functions, and argued that we need to design for those functions rather than some received idea of what happens in these different rooms. She argued that it shouldn't be called a kid's bedroom, it should be called the children's room and you should accommodate everything including sleep and play and homework and everything else that might happen there. That's one example.  Looking at Germane Barnes, he's in the MoMA show, and  there's a website that's related to his installation there, called A Spectrum of Blackness, where he has this really compelling, clear, but also very open oral history interviews with black residents of Miami representing different black cultures.  He asks very specific, but open-ended questions about what kinds of spaces they have in their homes, how they use them and connecting that to their different and related cultures. He says, what kinds of non kitchen things happen in the kitchen, and people talking about that being a place where you get your hair done. And so, I think these are one historical and contemporary example, but I think they illustrate that people have different needs. We need to think  precisely about different cultures. If we don't, then we'll be designing only for the dominant culture in this country. Also, connecting back to my work,  as an undergrad at Berkeley thinking about people with different bodies and different abilities, different genders, different ages, I've done a lot of work in design for aging. You can only really learn how to design for different people by asking them.  I got to do a piece recently for Architectural Design, the London based publication, where I looked at how do I measure social equity in the United States? I think we're in an important moment  in architecture around different kinds of issues around equity, and comes with foregrounding different voices. 

Nina

Who shows up?

Karen

Right, exactly. Yeah.  It's a hard question because just like there's greenwashing, there can be  participation washing, and also participation overload. So, I think it's important to look at how to make those processes equitable and specifically things like, making sure there's childcare on site, making sure  there is interpretation, different languages.  I think we need to acknowledge that all of this takes time and money, so, finding the resources for that and arguing that is a critical part of the design process.  How do you make sure that different people who aren't always represented, are there? I think you make it incredibly easy for them. 

Nina

Their needs, and also potentially a social experience. Reminds me of a project that the UN innovation group built for women to get health care.  I'm not remembering exactly what the healthcare piece of it was, but what they did was they turned it into a nail salon. So, everybody wanted to come for the nail salon. You make it more interesting, sometimes easy, social, fun. Your friends are going. 

Karen

Food always helps. What's really important also is, how can you make it authentic? I remember I was facilitating our participation session around ideas for the future of East Harlem. And, there was someone at my table, I think she was a resident of public housing. She said, 'I've been coming to these things for decades. And, usually people dismiss my ideas, but I feel like I have to try.'  So, that is true. It is true very often that there are participation sessions, and it's checking the box and ideas are not carried forward.  It's critical not only to do the work, but to build in accountability to various stakeholders. And, to be clear about how will they be able to measure whether their feedback is considered, and how will you bring that back to them, or prove it to them. Not just going and extracting knowledge and then leaving. There's a number of ways for people who are leading these sessions or, designing these buildings, or developing them, or financing them, to be accountable to the people who are involved in the sessions. 

Nina

Right. And, often if one is looking to accumulate data, you may get 10%, 20%, 30% said this, and 50% said that, and that might weigh what the solution starts to be. But, sometimes it's that one little idea in the corner.... 

Right, that’s maybe the 1%, actually, that's the most interesting one, but it doesn't translate into a large piece of the data. 

Karen

Right, yeah. Maybe I'll mention something that I'm really proud of. I mentioned that the first way that I got into housing was by volunteering for a project called New Housing New York. That was an ideas competition. Well, after that, I ended up leading the follow-up competition of the same name, that was to develop a built project.  It was the city's first competition in affordable and sustainable housing, which today sounds like, okay, duh, of course, affordable and sustainable at once. But back then, it wasn't such a forgone conclusion. Many people thought that sustainable design is too expensive. So we said, no,  that's critical. I led later with co-chairs the steering committee that produced that competition, made up of architects, developers, and city officials.  I think what was really important is, I was talking about accountability. So I'll give a little story about how we built in accountability to our process, which is to say that  we were very fortunate to work closely with the community board in the south Bronx where we had our site given to us by the city. And, we talked with them about their vision for the future of the neighborhood, what they thought was important in terms of sustainability and social equity. And then we put that in the request for proposals. So basically you could not win the contract. You could not win the competition without demonstrating how you would address the community's desires. So ,it was that particular moment. And then another moment, it was  a two-stage request for qualifications and then request for proposals. When we had finalists, we brought them directly in touch with the community members so that they could have a conversation around that. They were being held accountable. The competition resulted in the project called Via Verde, which is the 222 unit affordable housing development in south Bronx, designed by Dattner Architects with Grimshaw, and developed by Phipps with Jonathan Rose. The third piece of all of this, was after the competition. So often you see a competition ends and a very flashy, beautiful design wins, and then…

Nina

Very different afterwards.

Karen

Yeah, exactly. So, it's value engineered to death. So, how do you stop that? In our case, there was a joint review committee put together of the various agencies in New York, that would have to review the design. They were working together with a representative from our committee to ensure that the residents of the south Bronx got a product that was equal in quality to the winning design. So, that's just one story of how we tried to build in accountability, so that communities were actually part of the real built design. 

Nina

That sounds great. I'm curious about what are some of the unexpected stories or information that came out of working directly with people that you actually had never thought about, or considered? You work in large teams with many stakeholders. Can you think of something that  none of you had thought about, that was really interesting and critical?  Maybe it's themes that may have developed. 

Karen

Right. Let's see if I can recall it.  I got to convene a program around the Via Verde project, such an important project for so many people, really beautiful homes for 222 households. The program was co-sponsored by the Pratt desegregation think tank, which I'm on, and University of Pennsylvania's Socio- Spatial Collaborative led by Daniel Aldana Cohen. We had the program and Jonathan Rose, the developer for Via Verde, was recalling a community session for Via Verde. Someone said they wanted a hot tub or a spa or something that maybe sounds extravagant. In that, Jonathan heard okay, we need spaces to come together and we need spaces that are dignified and fun and, really beautiful. Something that came out of that, there are no hot tubs, unfortunately, but the design is built around a courtyard that brings together people of different incomes. Via Verde means 'the green way'. So,  literally, from the courtyard, you can take steps up to a series of stepped roofs. What resulted ultimately from talking with residents is a courtyard, that's very beautiful and also very carefully programmed, right? Because it's not just the physical design, but it's how the project is programmed, and it's  how it's maintained, that being a critical piece that doesn't get discussed enough. This is a space where they've done movie nights, they have resident gardening, they have different kinds of community activities and beautiful spaces that might be slightly different from what residents talked about, but it came from their ideas for what they wanted.

Nina

They may have really wanted a spa, or a hot tub. 

Karen

They might've wanted a hot tub and I might've gotten that wrong.  But, thinking through what are the underlying... 

Nina

Yeah, what's underneath the requests. The larger request. 

Karen

Yes. 

Nina

“I am Nina Freedman speaking with Karen Kubey, the urbanist and houser working on affordable housing as the generative factor in social equity.”

Nina

Karen, you have edited a really amazing book  in 2018, called Housing as Intervention: Architecture toward Social Equity. And, I understand you're now working on a new book, The Guide to Affordable Housing in the United States. Can you tell us what the distinction is between the two, and what your goal is for this new book?

Karen

I think both books are looking at architecture and social equity. My goal is always to use my time and to use my work  to further those goals. So, the first book  it's an edited collection of 17 essays, that looks at a couple of questions. One, how housing design and the processes behind them might be interventions towards greater social equity, and defining that broadly, so that each essay could look at whatever the main issue was, whether it's racial justice, health equity, gender, environmental justice. So, really allowing each writer to look specifically at what social equity meant in their context. The second question, looking how collaborative work and housing might reposition the architectural profession at large. So, looking at architects working, yes, definitely producing beautiful well-designed buildings. Yes, to architecture with a capital A, and also architects working with allied fields, working with residents, as we've just been talking about, developing new forms of housing, leveraging new funding systems. So, looking at that work and  how architects are advocating for improving our housing systems and also finding creative ways to work within current constraints. So, that book I'm very proud of, and it was global and contemporary. With the new one, it's meant to be extremely practical and useful, while offering a critical framework. What I mean by that is, we are developing a comprehensive guide to affordable housing in the United States, centered on a series of case studies, organized geographically. So, that if you're in Arizona, you can look at what's going on in New Mexico and not say, 'Hey, I don't care where they're doing in Boston, that doesn't help me here. What we're doing is an update to a book from 1997 called 'Good Neighbors'.  'Good Neighbors' is a book produced by three architects in the San Francisco bay area, Mike Pyatok, Tom Jones and Willie Pettus. In their book, there's also a series of well illustrated case studies from across the country, also included resident profiles, policy, and design guidance. So, this was really important ammunition in the hands of anyone trying  to produce better and more affordable housing. Not just architects, but also developers, community leaders, and the way you can use it is, whoever you're trying to convince,  you can open up to your section of the country and find 10, 20 examples of the best work that's been produced. So, if someone says 'we can't do that', you can say, 'well, yes we can. They did it. It was X dollars per square foot, and here's the story of how they got it done'. And, so yes, we can, and must do better. 1997 was a long time ago. This was a moment where low-income housing tax credits had been around long enough, where you had a body of work. This is a moment of multiculturalism. Now, what I realized doing research is that, of course there have been other books on affordable housing since then, but none as comprehensive and authoritative as this one. And, I think we're in a moment where the housing crisis is absolutely out of control. The conversation has changed.  So I think there's a possibility to have much more to really assert that housing is a human right, and to put resources into designing and building better housing. We really need a resource to support that work. So I'm excited to be working on a new version, which will have many similarities to the old one. It will be very easy to use, designed around case studies and we're mostly focusing on new work. And also, I think not enough attention is given to maintenance. There's so much attention to the ribbon cutting. That's really exciting, and hooray for ribbon cuttings, but people's lives are really impacted by how a building performs over time. So, in addition to including contemporary work, we are going back to some of the case studies from the original book, and doing a more longitudinal analysis of how they've developed, or how they fared over time and offering critiques there. So, where that was a multiculturalist moment, I think we're now at a moment where we really need to be fiercely anti-racist in our work, and fiercely work toward climate justice. Those are two things that are going to be really prominent in this new book.

Nina

Are you working with a team? It sounds like a massive effort. 

Karen

We are in the early stages developing research and a larger team to get this work done.

Nina

Sounds like you'll be traveling in a trailer around the country. 

Karen

Exactly. 

Nina

Which is a good way to meet people and to get into the community. 

Karen

Right. 

Nina

Something that I've always wondered about. There's so much talk about getting more funding for more affordable housing. My question is about developer profits. Is it really so expensive to build, or are developer profits out of control, and is subsidization the right methodology rather than going back to the developers and just finding a way to say 'stop it'. It seems to me that's where the problem is potentially, but I could be wrong. 

Karen

Yeah. It's such an important question. There are so many developers doing really important work. And, of course that's how housing currently gets developed in this country. Of course, we've seen a big shift in the way we talk about health care, for instance, right, where Medicare for All, is no longer some kooky idea off to the side, but it's a mainstream concept. Similarly in housing, our housing system is unequal, and at the heart of it, I think what we need to look at is the fundamental disconnect and conflict between the need for housing and the right to housing, and housing as the major investment vehicle in the United States and globally, right? So, those are in conflict  if the same thing is being used for profit, and for survival. And of course, there is subsidy now, mainly in the form of low income housing tax credits. And if you look at any affordable housing project, you'll see a massive list of funding sources, so extremely inefficient, at present. There is no choice, but to think big and make big shifts, and at the same time, think small. So, I think it's important to do two things. One is to push for massive change at the federal level. And the other, is to support efforts at any scale, to decommodify housing. I think that a small community land trust, a small cooperative housing development,  these things are important and need to be supported, and I'm encouraged that there's more support in places like New York and we need more of it. But, maybe I'll tell  a story from my book 'Housing as Intervention', because that book is global, and sometimes we look at places like Sweden or Denmark. There are places that have different reality and they can be dismissed. Right. You can say, oh, that's a completely different political system. So  forget it, get out of my face with whatever they have going on for housing. I will talk about the story that is told by Paul Karakusevic who's working in London. London, like New York, is hyper capitalist. It's a global financial center and the UK, like the US, has a very similar shift. We had Reagan, they had Thatcher. And since then, disinvestment and privatization of what we call public housing, and they have social housing in the form of council flats. So, you had a very similar story on both sides of the Atlantic, but a different story over there, starting after the financial crash, and I think that we in the United States have a lot to learn from them.  In particular, private real estate development stalled both here and there, but they did something different, particularly in places like the Borough of Hackney. They took a little bit of stimulus and they restarted state built housing. They actually were building what they would call social housing for the first time in 40 years. They tried first an experiment and now they're doing more of it. So, they are actually building more, let's just call it public housing, like we do in the United States. 

Nina

The council flats, right? 

Karen

It is council flats. Yeah. I think it's really important because often in the United States you hear, oh yeah, that sounds great. But it can never happen here.  I think the fact that a place like London is building public housing shows that this is possible, even in a hyper capitalist society.  It's really important to know that a different future is possible and necessary.  And, I think, it's really important to look at initiatives like the green, new deal for public housing, which calls for 10 million new units of green public or social housing. That's massively important. And the grassroots works of the Homes Guarantee, which says fundamentally that housing is a human, right.  There's been so much good work. The conversation has shifted beyond what anyone in my circles could have imagined, 10 years ago. I'm really encouraged by that.

Nina

It's great to hear your optimism on it. In London, I lived in a short life house, as a student.

Karen

Tell me about that. 

Nina

So, sometimes they were apartments. Sometimes they were three story houses that were condemned. And, they were going to be pulled down at some point, but they didn't get to it yet.  Instead of leaving them empty, they called them short life houses. 

Karen

Oh. 

Nina

So, you could  live there. They were lacking in some important thing usually, but I paid four quid a week. It was like $6 a week.

Karen

What? 

Nina

I kid you not. I almost lived there for about a year, and it had no heat though. Heating for an English person was at that time less important than maybe for an American. People just did with less heating. But, I remember I used to cook with my hat and gloves on. And, I used to do some of my homework in a hot bathtub. 

Karen

Oh my goodness. 

Nina

But it was a magnificent space.  

Karen

Wow. 

Nina

Crazy, right? But it was a way to deal with housing stock that had real problems. We'll use so it didn't go derelict.

Karen

Interesting. Yeah. Wow. 

Nina

This is a side thing, but I'm curious about it. You were obviously soliciting designs from architectural groups or teams that want to engage in this discussion of affordable housing and provide those services. There's a whole lot of architects out there that really work on luxury housing. And, some of the people that work on luxury housing also work on affordable housing. As a group of idealists, which I think most architects are, there's also, this  want to put an iconic design on something, to put an imprint. There's this tension between the willfulness of that, and being in service to community participation and what they want, and how it might impact one's design. In my experience there is that tension of people that want to do great design, and often that comes at a conflict.  It's a hard one because we're trained as architects to want to do great design and to have an imprint, and for showing people the way, guiding them. With groups, we are guiding, but there is  a tremendous amount of listening that we need to do, and be willing to change. 

Karen

Yeah. Yeah. You're asking such an important question and it's making me think of a couple of things.  I think one thing that happens is that awards and magazines, press in general, rewards oftentimes a certain kind of architecture, that may or may not serve its residents. So, something that we're working on now, as we're developing the book is thinking about being precise in our criteria, so that projects that aren't as sexy, but do really work well for their residents, that those projects will be foregrounded. That's a hard thing to do.  And so, I think yeah, looking at what is really needed, looking at different cultures, and making sure that they're well-represented, and that doesn't just mean, someone might think, oh yeah, so you have to have the right colors and like maybe a mural or something, but it's so much more than that. And specifically, I think this is all around environmental justice.  It's really important that  designers of housing follow the lead of those most impacted by our environmental justice crises, and follow their lead entirely, in terms of culture, in terms of sustainability,  all of these things at once. And, that may or may not be the kind of project  that gets in the flashy magazine. Another thing I'm thinking about is people in power have a lot of ideas about what people want in affordable housing. Sometimes there's this idea that says, oh yeah, people don't have a lot of money. That means that they want traditional architecture. If it looks too nice or too modern or too whatever, then it's not for them. That's quite condescending. I know of architects who have produced really beautiful designs, and then they go through design review, and someone in power says, no, no, no, we need sloped roofs. Let's dial it back in terms of design and  you get something that is just not successful. So this connects to our conversation around participation and not assuming anything. People with low incomes are as diverse as anyone else and have different opinions. We need to be really careful looking at how decisions are made about what housing looks like.

Nina

If I can use something you said before, they asked for the spa, if we could use that as a metaphor, right? 

Karen

Right. Yeah. Or an actual spa, as you mentioned. 

Nina

But we could take it further. Yeah. Just, give me something beautiful and wonderful that I typically don't have.

Karen

Yeah. I mean, there's so many received ideas. It's like, I gave a very open assignment for my students at Oregon to produce affordable housing. And I didn't tell them how many square feet per unit, or anything like that. They all came back with really tiny apartments and, it was like, well, why are you doing that? So, there are received ideas about what people of different incomes deserve. And, you see things very cliched for people experiencing homelessness. You see tiny windowless boxes. No one designing them would live in them, but there was an idea that, oh, they've been living on the street, and so this is appropriate for them. It's absolutely critical to push back on the shrinking of design standards, and to think expansively about what people deserve. Coming at housing from an idea of scarcity is not the right approach. It can often produce spaces that really are not very livable. It's really critical to approach this from an idea of generosity, and make sure that people not only have a roof over their head, but everyone has a very livable place to live.

Nina

Right.  Lastly, is there one thing that  still plagues you about this topic that you just wish could be solved, but  it hasn't been, aside from the funding. The funding is a big one, but what else, what plagues you about this, that makes you keep going and working on it?

Karen

Aside from the funding you say. Let's say, I mean, what plagues me about this is that, so many people are ill housed. So many people are rent burdened. We're so far from where we need to be. Housing should be a human right. We should just achieve that in this country.  And so, if you're asking what plagues me,  it's chipping away,  working at the margins. I think we must follow the lead of people who are pushing for transformative solutions that will result not just in slightly more affordable, slightly nicer, slightly, whatever. What we need is affordable, beautiful housing, green housing for all. It's achievable and I think we need to push for nothing less than that.

Nina

Beautifully said, thank you so much, Karen.

Karen

This was so fun. 

Nina

Your enthusiasm is infectious, and I think you're really going to achieve great things. And, you have already. 

Karen

Thank you. 

Nina

“Dear listeners. Thank you for being here. I invite you to reflect on what you've heard today, and send your thoughts or stories. We would love to hear from you. Stay in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website thewhereing.com. Subscribe free to Whereing wherever you get your podcasts, so that you are alerted when the next episode airs. Whereing is a pro bono initiative of Dreamland Creative Projects, which provides architectural and interior design services for the places where we live, heal, age and inspire. If you wish to have a design consultation, visit dreamlandcreativeprojects.com or email me, nina@dreamlandcreativeprojects.com. Until we meet again, goodbye from Whereing.”