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Round Top Register - Truehome.net - Subscribe - Sentient Architecture, LLC
Dreaming of a True Home
Register Editor and Family to Become Internet Millionaires?
By Chris Travis
Something very exciting is happening in my life.
Since I have the habit of sharing my personal circumstances with my long-suffering readers, I have decided it is time to tell you the story of a project I have been working on for years that will soon become very public.
It is a story about a family who works together, and an intellectual quest that began well over fifteen years ago that will soon come to fruition.
Hopefully it will be a rags to riches story, but whatever happens in the end, it is the tale of a small group of people who have taken enormous risks against all odds to create something they truly believe can help people find their way home.
The intellectual seeds of this project are almost two decades old, but roughly eight years ago, what had been a casual interest became an obsession. That obsession eventually led me to gather a team of smart people to help me with my project, and I am exceedingly proud of what we have been able to create.
This fall, we will be launching a new website.
We call our Internet-based application Truehome, and if things proceed according to schedule, it will be launched at truehome.net some time in November of this year.
Those of you who have followed my writing in the Register have already been exposed to many of the ideas that inspired this project. I have written about those thoughts on some occasions in such detail that I put most of you to sleep.
The process is now part of a pending patent and so even if I did want to share the specifics; my bossy attorney would not let me. So I will try not to bore you with the theory behind what we are doing, but simply tell the tale of how it came to be, what use it offers people who want to improve their homes, and how I feel near the end of my journey.
In the mid 1970's, I began my career as a designer and builder in Houston. My business grew. I made a good living and achieved a certain degree of success. But honestly, I never felt truly at home. Feeling at home is really a big deal. When people don't feel that they have a place to go where they can feel safe and comfortable, it adds considerable stress to their lives.
That is now a clearly established scientific fact. A stressful and poorly fitting home environment can make you sick.
These days I help people create homes that fit for a living in my day job, in which I am the Managing Partner of an architecture firm. I think my fascination with "being at home" comes from the fact that for many years, I felt like I had no true home.
When the Queen and I moved first moved to South Texas in 1974, we were broke hippies in our early twenties with an infant daughter.
The circumstances around our move made us feel sympathetic with the angel, Lucifer. If you remember the story, old Lucifer - now demonized by much of the world's population - fell from grace. He was tossed out of heaven by God Almighty and plummeted all the way to the deepest depths of Hell.
That was how my wife and I felt when we first moved to Houston. Eight months before our fall from grace, we left Austin - where we had been haphazardly attended the University of Texas - for the mountains of Colorado.
We were seeking a life we imagined would enrich us spiritually. We had rejected the traditional values of our parents, and wanted nothing but peace, love and nature…a life we thought would bring us inner riches.
The Queen and I hadn't the slightest interest in business or financial success. It was a time of exploration for people of my generation.
I was preoccupied with my dream of becoming a song-writer and folk singer. The Queen was preoccupied with being a good mother.
Young people thrive on dreams. We had no money, but we had a lot of dreams, and for that reason considered ourselves rich and without limitations.
Seven months later, in the face of a recession in the local construction industry, we found ourselves in a lodge in Vail, Colorado with $2.35 to our names, no steady jobs, and rent due the next day. I had been laid off three weeks before from my job painting condos on the side of a mountain due to a fight between my boss and the builder of the project.
My wife was working part-time changing sheets at a Holiday Inn and I had not been able to find any kind of work, including working in a local mine.
That Friday, we came face to face for the first time with the fact that money does indeed make a difference.
My last boss, who lived outside Denver, owed me $72.00 from my last check. We bought $2.35 worth of gas for the VW microbus and took off for Denver to get the only money we had left in the world. That night about ten o'clock we made it to my boss' house, collected the check, and took off for the community of Longmont where we had friends who would put us up overnight.
About five miles outside Longmont, close to midnight, our microbus threw a rod. We found ourselves sitting on the side of the road at midnight with no money, a $72.00 check, a ruined vehicle, and a crying baby. Our friends came and picked us up. The next day, I borrowed two dollars from my buddy, bought a $74.00 plane ticket, and sent my wife and child home to her parents in Houston.
I begged for a week for a job, found one at a company appropriately named "Faith Construction," and within a few weeks was able save up enough money to fix up an old station wagon we had previously abandoned, and load up our dogs and cats (who had being staying with our patient friends).
I left for Texas in a cloud of black exhaust.
The seven months we were in Colorado, it rained three times. The first three days after I arrived in Houston, it rained non-stop. We slept on the floor of my in-law's day care center for a couple of months until we could get on our feet, waking each morning at 6 AM and moving our bed out of the classroom in which we slept. It was not a spiritually enriching experience, but it did underline my recently learned life lesson.
Money does matter.
That was the first turning point in my adult life. I felt like I had failed my wife and child. I grew up very quickly in the face of that trauma, almost immediately becoming a man who worked long hours and is pre-occupied with providing for his family. This change in behavior led to my first small remodeling and historic restoration business.
After several years, it led to my firm being named "Remodeler of the Year" by the Greater Houston Builder's Association.
By the early 1980's I had thirty-five employees and had become somewhat of a success. But I was haunted by the feeling that I was living a life in a way that was somehow being driven by forces beyond my control.
I had always been interested in the workings of the mind. I began reading science fiction avidly when I was about ten and over the years that interest in speculative science evolved into an interest in real science - psychology, philosophy of mind, systems science and evolutionary biology - among other disciplines.
I was also a "self-improvement" fanatic. I participated in almost every type of "transformational" program in which I could enroll. Eventually, I began to coach people who were seeking to have their businesses support their personal goals, which I now find a bit hypocritical since at the time, I had not come to terms with my own.
Then in the late 1980's, it all fell apart. The recession in the oil business had gutted the construction industry in Houston. My production manager and I had been invited to serve as the President and Production Manager of a small but fast growing manufacturing business by a relative who ran a bank. That firm’s sales grew to fifteen times what they were when I took over the business, but in the end it turned out I had picked the wrong partners.
It’s a long story, and not worth repeating here, but that was the second big turning point in my adult life.
I lost everything, including my self respect and a reasonable portion of my sanity.
But every cloud has a silver lining. In the process of working through the personal issues I was having about my bankruptcy, my interest in psychology returned and I began to bring parts of it into my newly reborn design and construction business.
I began to look at how my client's relationships and goals interacted with their home environments. I began to look for ways I could use the design of their homes to mitigate issues in their relationships.
I used to joke that we were not just remodeling their homes, but "remodeling their lives."
In the meantime, the Queen and I had decided we were tired of city life. We had never really liked life in Houston, but had simply been trapped by the opportunities it had offered us. If we were going to have to start all over again, we reasoned, we might as well move somewhere we might actually enjoy living.
In 1991, I got the chance to be the restoration contractor for what is now known as the Round Top Inn. Another family later bought it but in those days, it was a compound of eight historic buildings, six on their original site, and two that we moved on site. We were converting them into a large Bed and Breakfast.
I came to Round Top with no credit, no crew, no money, and just one chance to get it right. The Queen and our three children were still in school in Houston, so every Monday morning early I would leave for Round Top, work all week, and then return to Houston that Friday night.
I started the project swinging a hammer, the sole carpenter on the job. I was well into restoring the second building before I was able to hire any help.
In the mid 1980's, I had made the cover of the Houston Post's Sunday business section, but by 1992 I was sleeping on an air mattress on the second floor of the old Schiege House. Mice ran across my bed at night. I had finally hit rock bottom.
Alone all week, I had plenty of time to think. In the evenings I would sit in an old rocking chair on the wood plank porch and play my guitar. I was surprised to find myself inexplicably happy.
My circumstances had not improved, but everything seemed right with the world as I rocked on that high, worn balcony. I began to ask myself why...and before long I uncovered the source of my unexplained peace of mind.
I remembered a time and place from my childhood. In my reverie, I was very young and sitting on my great-grandfather's knee as he rocked back and forth humming a little song.
I called him Nandaddy. I can still see him in my mind's eye, dressed in worn pin-striped overalls, a broad smile on his face. "Come hug my neck," he would say.
When I was a very young boy, I spent a lot of time on that porch. My mother, little sister and I sought sanctuary there during hard times. I cannot remember a time in my life when I felt more loved or appreciated.
Nandaddy and Grandmother lived in a cypress-sided turn-of-the-century country farmhouse in Milam County, deep in rural Texas. It had a high wood plank porch which wrapped around three sides, a tin roof, and a windmill.
Years later, the architectural features I could see from a similar porch in Round Top brought back unconscious memories of that cherished time…and with them a profound sense of well being. Suddenly I understood why I kept returning to historic restoration work even though, truth be told, it was less profitable than my other building ventures. I realized then that we all view the world through a broad set of internal associations, most but not all from our childhood. This internal landscape determines how we respond emotionally to the architecture in our surroundings.
That day, I discovered a key feature of what I was to later call my "emotional architecture."
When I moved to Round Top a few months later, I created the first true home I had ever experienced as an adult out of an old farmhouse my oldest son and I restored from scratch.
I was like a phoenix rising from the fire in those first few years in our tiny town. I rebuilt my life better than it had ever been from the ashes of my utter failure. It taught me something powerful about the nature of "home."
Those realizations led directly to the creation of Truehome.net fifteen years later, but there were many steps in between. In the last half of the 1990's, I converted my design/build business into an architecture firm by partnering up with a registered architect.
I developed a simple workshop for my clients that helped them discover in great detail their own unique "emotional architecture," and how they might use that knowledge to make good decisions about their projects.
That little workshop proved to be very successful. Clients who used that early version always got their homes built. For seven years, my first round preliminary designs were always accepted, something unheard of in practicing residential architecture firms…and people loved the results because they fit their lives.
It also cost me about 30% less to produce a satisfactory design when that workshop was used, compared to when it was not. That got my attention.
For the next three years, I spent every extra minute educating myself about why that might be happening, and expanding what at that time was called the Homes of the Heart Workshop.
I visited with clinical psychologists, architects, environmental psychologists, systems scientists and any other person whose expertise I thought might bear on my research.
The workshop went into a research phase in which I offered big breaks in my fees to clients who would "beta test" my developing new process.
Finally, the workshop reached the point that I began to require all clients of our architecture firm to use it when we were hired to design their home.
By this time, my oldest son had come back to Round Top and bought my construction company, so I had a lot more time and could focus on my design practice and my growing project. Our research got more formal. My daughter, who has a masters degree in counseling and a friend who is a Ph.D. clinical psychologist, joined our design team on those projects.
By a stroke of luck, I was able to have my workshop reviewed by one of the top psychological testing tool developers in the nation, and he loved it.
Here's what he had to say:
"Chris Travis, in his conceptualization and implementation of Homes from the Heart, has captured a coalescence of the behavioral and brain sciences that allows the creation of a living environment that is truly a home, one that nourishes our psychological needs and that enhances our biological state at the same time.
"The Homes from the Heart Workshop is a credible tool that seeks out the design that will prove to be nurturing to...our needs and allow us to heal when necessary, to take refuge from the stresses of work and the world at large, and to regain our equilibrium. Clinical intuition supports Travis' work in this regard but, more importantly, the behavioral and brain sciences both lead me to believe it will be effective as a strategy for the design of positive, progressive, healing environments for living."
Cecil Reynolds, Ph.D - Internationally known expert in psychological testing and assessment, author of The Handbook of School Psychology, and the Encyclopedia of Special Education, Past President of the National Academy of Neuropsychology and the author of the Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL), one of the most widely used psychological testing tools in the United States.
Since then I have been honored by other endorsements.
After getting that endorsement, I was feeling pretty proud of all my work. I have been working on a business plan for two years that involved taking that technology to the Internet. I was dreaming - like tens of thousands of others - of being the next Bill Gates. However, I had no chance of pulling that off in the real world because I lacked the expertise to convert my process to software, and lacked the capital to pay anyone else to do it. Developing software is very expensive proposition if you have to pay market value.
Now perhaps you can tell that the Queen and I are blessed with some pretty amazing children, all of whom I have milked for my own financial gain.
The entire time they were growing up, whenever I gave them a gift and they tried to thank me, I told that thanks was not necessary...that one day they would grow up and get a job, and all I wanted was a check every month.
My oldest son, the one who bought my building company, still works with me regularly though we have independent businesses. When he made his first payment on that business a few years ago, I called the other two kids up and said, “Well, your brother is starting to pay up. When do you think you might be able to start sending your checks?”
I’m still working on that, but even so I have found ways to exploit their talents.
My daughter was my research assistant throughout much of the development of the workshop. She is also a brilliant and talented person, a great mom, and a fine teacher.
My youngest son is the one who made truehome.net
possible.
He’s a computer genius. He left Round Top right after graduating from RT/C High School and moved to Denver to take a technology job.
Soon afterwards, he was hired by the third largest enterprise software company in the America, J. D. Edwards Company. He started as a temp on their help desk, and within a few months was running that department. One of the top IT gurus in the company noticed his talent and decided to mentor him, and next thing you know, he was a systems engineer.
About that time, PeopleSoft, the second largest enterprise software company in America, bought his employer, and our son suddenly found himself personally responsible for managing thousands of computers for both companies spread all over the world. He had to learn a lot of complex programming skills to do the job, and do the job he did, getting raise after raise as they added responsibilities to an already overwhelming list.
Then, before he knew it, Oracle, the largest enterprise software company in America decided to take over PeopleSoft. After an extended battle the two companies came to terms, and suddenly our son found himself working for a company whose corporate culture he did not like.
Many top level professionals had left the two previous companies when they changed hands, More left with the Oracle takeover. Many of these people knew my son and his mentor personally or by reputation.
Before I knew it, my little boy had left Oracle and started a consulting business. His first customer was the Starz television network. He was just twenty-four years old.
Like my other children, this son knew all about what I was doing with the Homes of the Heart Workshop. The prospects that project offered interested my home-grown computer genius, and the next thing you know, he showed up in Round Top.
In a week had written a piece of software that would allow me to start the process of converting what I had created into a format that would work on the Internet. That happened last March. We immediately went into business with one another.
Now, less than six months later, our website is almost complete, including the extremely complex database behind it that allows us to provide detailed reports to people who decide to take the suite of exercises we have developed.
It is now known as the Truehome Workshop, but it is still about finding the home of your heart. There is nothing else like it on the Internet. It is sort of an eHarmony.com for homes.
Truehome.net uses both architectural programming techniques and psychological testing to help people discover all the details of their ideal home.
The website contains a large suite of exercises that in total provide detailed criteria about what a family or individual needs to create a home that truly fits their sensibilities, tastes, circumstances, lifestyle, relationships and life goals.
It coaches couples about how to make decision about their homes without conflict, and how your home can mitigate minor relationship issues with its design. It helps you discover their unique privacy and intimacy needs. It helps you discover how your home can support your life goals and social values.
It helps you discover the architectural style and features that make your heart sing. It teaches you how to effectively manage your budget.
It gives you the power to tailor your project exactly to your unique needs and desires. The Truehome Workshop provides a step by step method by which families can discover the home that truly fits who they are. If you are so inclined, you can purchase a digital copy of the Truehome Workshop at our website.
The criteria it develops can then be shared with an architect, a builder, an interior decorator, or a realtor - or for that matter in a do-it-yourself project - and used to inform priorities.
Having this information allows a family to be much more effective at making wise decisions about their home improvement dollar.
Professionals may know a lot more than you do about how to design or build your home, but what makes a house a home must come from the heart of those who will inhabit it. However, that information is not that easy to identify on your own.
The truth is, a "home" is not really a building at all. It is an experience. Home is an emotional experience one has when inhabiting in a living space that truly fits. It is a feeling of being safe, comfortable, proud of your accomplishments, and surrounded by the people and things that you love.
That unique experience is really a result of how your brain reacts to features in your most intimate of environments. It is almost entirely emotional, and often thinking about it is not a lot of help. Many of the most important aspects of that set of reactions are subconscious, and not always easy to identify rationally.
Many of those deep feelings come from childhood or past experiences that are unique to each individual.
That's what Truehome offers people, and if we can fulfill its promise over the next couple of years, it will help many folks find their way home.
Our family is extraordinarily proud of it. We think it will truly help people. We want to invite all of our readers to visit the site when it launches later this fall, and try it out for free.
We're not idiots. Unlike when I was living in Colorado in the 1970's, I now care about money. In fact, I'm still fantasizing about being the next Bill Gates.
It’s easy. Simply go to Truehome.net and give it a try. No tricks. No obligation. No cost.
Wow! I sound like an Internet huckster already. All these years of hyping this free tabloid might come in handy. Goodness knows I have pushed enough of my own wares with this rag.
Maybe when this is all over, I will get to buy a big ranch near Round Top and act like a big shot. I’ll be able to build a big wing on the Round Top Library.
On the other hand, maybe we won't strike it rich. After all, the future is always filled with uncertainty. But hey, if the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket, at least I have the Round Top Register to fall back on. It makes at least $100 every quarter like clockwork.
I've come a long way from that day when my VW microbus broke down. At least if this project goes bust, I won't have to borrow a quarter to make a phone call for help.
But honestly, life has taught me that if you keep working, keep dreaming, and never give up...things work out.
So I expect Truehome.net will do just that.
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