True life

"Effortless" and "inevitable" are architect Steven Harris's two favorite words. With sensitivity to the surrounding landscape, Steven Harris Architects designs spaces that are custom-tailored to their clients' daily lives and experiences. His dining rooms are not aggrandizements of tradition, they are places to eat, to gather, or even work; his entry halls are not the primary places of arrival, but rather the final segments of a long trajectory that begins when the resident turns off the main road or exits the elevator. True Life, the firm's first monograph, showcases an exceptional range of residential work from the past twenty-five years. Organized by the activities that propel their designs--dine, lounge, study, play, sleep, and so on--it focuses on people rather than objects. The firm's spaces are not meant to set lifestyle changes into motion, but rather cater to those routines already in progress. Herein lies the genius of the work: they let the client speak for the house, not the house for the client. A foreword by writer A.M. Homes places Steven Harris Architects in the context of contemporary architecture and speaks to the understated elegance of the firm's designs.