Below are my sustainability takeaways from both my professional and personal experience. These musings don’t focus on products because products change rapidly and there’s already a plethora of research sources for better products*.

These musings focus on the bigger opportunity that happens with a shift in our mindset. Our brains are wired to have unhelpful expectations of fashion, size, perfection, personalization, and price. The most sustainable solutions will come from creatively responding to these wants to develop something better.

• Research suggests that people don’t live in their homes as long as they think they will. Implementing a design that gets trashed by a new owner is not sustainable.  Long-game, versatile design is sustainable design.

• Long-game, versatile design does not mean boring design. You can personalize your space — and quite creatively if you want. It’s just a matter of how.

• People don’t repair cabinets as readily as they replace them.  And, unlike any other material, replacing cabinets leads to replacing everything else in the room. Thus cabinet quality, maintenance, and material are important. 

• Designing for “patina” helps avoid “wear.”

• Sustainability-oriented design strives to do more with less. There are many new products that do just that.  It’s important to be open to them.

• Gravity is a fact. Perfection is an opinion.  Perfection has been weaponized to sell materials that are not renewable.  That gives renewable materials an unnecessary handicap. 

• Biophilia – nature-inspired design -- is a helpful antidote to perfection and status anxiety.

• It’s helpful to source big, heavy things close to home.

• If it smells bad, avoid it.

• If a design requires that you throw away or hide your existing tools or treasures, start over.

• If a design will make the rest of your house look bad, start over.

• Just because something can be recycled doesn’t mean that it’s likely to be recycled.

• Discontent fuels consumption. Examine your contentment carefully.

• In surveys, the number one regret kitchen buyers report is that they didn’t spend more for the things that mattered.  This happened to me too.  The decisions we make when we are nervous are not the same as when we feel safe. And we’re usually safer than we feel when we build a new kitchen. Buy things that matter.

*See https://healthymaterialslab.org/ as a great example