GETTING YOUR HOUSE RIGHT
Cusato collaborated
on a book with the James Hardie Siding Company titled The Value of Design.
“The book talks about that
garage-dominated front of the house…it approaches everything from houses with
too many gables to not using materials like wallpaper. We talk about why it’s
happened so you can avoid it happening,” she said. “A builder keeps building
these boring boxes so they try to differentiate and mix in stone, arch windows,
phony details. Builders need to learn to look at the street as larger
composition and put in fewer details but do them really well.”
Cusato,
for the record, is a designer, not an architect – “I haven’t sat for the exam,
but I’m so happy doing what I’m doing as a designer. The New York-based (her
Greenwich Village apartment is only 300 square feet, the Katrina Cottage felt
like home, not a demonstration kit) Cusato is thrilled that her Gulf Coast
cottage has sparked a nationwide discussion.
“The cottage opened the dialogue for New
Urbanism, for building better places -- it got people’s attention,” she said.
“The message is pretty basic: build very nice places, make them realistic and easy
to execute and live in.”
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