What Live in Art Means to Me

Art isn’t something you hang on a wall. It’s something you live inside of.

People hear the phrase and assume it’s about the house. A certain style. A certain price. Something with enough glass and enough ceiling height to photograph well. That isn’t it.

To live in art is a way of life. It has nothing to do with square footage. Nothing to do with whether your home is simple and clean or layered and full. It’s not about the house at all.

It’s about how you feel when you’re standing in it.

The question underneath it

Do you appreciate yourself? Your own reflection. Your own thoughts. The person you’ve become.

That’s the real question, and it’s the one nobody asks while they’re picking a plan. The conversation is usually about bedroom count and lot fit and what the neighbors built. All of that matters. I draw for a living, so I take it seriously.

But it isn’t the thing.

You are a piece of art. Not because of where you live. Because of who you are.

What I actually do

Every plan we design starts in my own mind. I draw lines on paper, and those lines become walls, and those walls become a place someone calls home.

That’s the craft. That’s what I do, and I’ve been doing it since 2003.

The lines are real work. Where the light lands in the morning. How far you walk from the car to the kitchen with your hands full. Whether two people can pass each other in the hallway without turning sideways. Whether the room your family actually lives in is the biggest room or an afterthought behind the garage.

I think about those things for a long time before anyone sees a drawing.

But the art isn’t the blueprint.

The part I can’t draw

The art is you, living inside it.

I can’t give you that feeling. I can only build the space that holds it.

That’s the honest limit of what a house plan is, and I’d rather say it out loud than pretend otherwise. A plan is a container. What goes in it is yours. The Sunday mornings, the arguments, the birthdays, the years where nothing much happens and you don’t realize until later that those were the good ones.

No drawing produces that. A good drawing just gets out of the way of it.

Why we say it

I put Live in Art on the company because it’s the standard I’m trying to hold myself to. Not a promise about the product. A reminder about the point.

If you walk into a house I drew and you feel more like yourself in it, the plan worked. If the house is beautiful and you feel like a guest in it, the plan didn’t, no matter how it photographs.

So that’s what the phrase means to me. It’s the beginning of everything else I’m going to write in this column, and it’s the thing I come back to when a plan isn’t working and I can’t tell why.

Look around the room you’re in right now. Ask whether it holds you or whether you’re just storing your things in it.

JJ Barja
Founder, Elite Design Group

Live in Art.