The house is valuable because it is the house.

Two weeks ago, I quietly pushed up a new look for this website. Some redesigns happen over a year or two; others happen over a few months. Neither one’s easy, mind you, but this one’s the latter. A month or so back, I told an old friend I was in the middle of redesigning this little site. She laughed and said, “Again?!” Which, you know, extremely and completely fair! The last design went up in March of last year, giving it a little more than 15 months in the sun. I loved it when it went up, and I still do: there were some little flourishes that felt right at launch, and I’m proud of myself for figuring out how to build a few design elements that I honestly didn’t think I could build. But in last few months, I couldn’t look at the site without seeing every rough edge: the uneven gaps that had crept into the design, the too-clever layouts that felt fragile, the long passages of text that never felt like they nailed the rhythm. And the boxes! My god, the boxes: for related articles, for…