Some people might argue over politics or what kind of music is appropriate for a wedding reception, but what people who love architecture argue about is shutters.  They argue about everything from the proper shutter-to-window ratio to whether hinges and shutter dogs have to be functional.  It’s pretty amusing to see the kind of heated dialogue that can happen in comment sections.  So, let’s talk about it. We recently installed vinyl shutters on our house, selecting a size and scale that matched the existing shutters on other windows and likely the original shutters on this 1970 brick ranch house.  I did this knowing full well that they are not proper shutters.  Most of the shutters on American homes built in the last 50 years aren’t proper shutters.  Most of them are strictly decorative, and they aren’t even trying to pretend that they are functional shutters.  Americans collectively decided somewhere along

On Instagram yesterday, I was asked if there was a standard for selecting the right height for nightstands.  I thought that was a great question and one I never looked up, but I have typically chosen nightstands that felt like the right height for the bed they were paired with.  I like nightstands that are roughly the same height as the top of the mattress or perhaps a little bit taller.  This makes reaching for things easy when turning off an alarm in the morning, checking a text or call, grabbing a tissue, or turning a lamp on and off.  I decided to look it up to see if conventional decorating guidelines match my intuition on the matter, and they do.  There isn’t a standard height as there is for chair rail and countertops, but a guideline based on each individual room. I like a tall mattress.  It’s not right