Nobody sets out to build a haunted house.

Well, almost nobody.

But somewhere, sometime, someone looked at a house with a generous porch, an elaborate roofline, and a tower overlooking the street and thought, “That’s where the ghosts live.”

Someone else had once looked at that same house and thought, “That’s where I want to raise my family.”

What changed?

With Halloween approaching, I found myself interested in that question. Not whether ghosts exist. That’s outside my scope of services.

I wanted to know when a perfectly respectable house became the architectural equivalent of a warning label.

You know the house I mean. Close your eyes and picture it.

It probably isn’t a cheerful ranch with an attached two-car garage. You’re more likely imagining a tall, aging house with an uneven silhouette, a deep porch, elaborate trim, and perhaps one light burning in an upstairs window.

Apparently, even ghosts appreciate a little architectural character.

But the story behind that image says something important about the work you and I do.

More on that, but first, let's dig deeper into the Victorian style.

For this discussion, “Victorian” is a broad umbrella, not a single set of matching architectural details. We’re talking about the nineteenth-century houses that popular culture has gathered into one familiar spooky silhouette.

The important point is that these houses weren’t originally designed as scenery for someone’s nightmare.

Art historian Sarah Burns studied their transformation from desirable residences into symbols of fear. As Erin Blakemore explains in JSTOR Daily’s account of Burns’s research, houses that were simply homes in the 1870s had acquired associations with terror, death, and decay roughly half a century later.

Think about that.

The distance between “lovely home” and “don’t go in there” was only a few decades.

The roof didn’t suddenly become sinister. The porch didn’t develop bad intentions. Someone didn’t discover that decorative brackets attracted supernatural activity.

The interpretation changed.

And that change didn’t happen because one director needed a frightening location. It developed through changing tastes, cultural criticism, paintings, photographs, stories, and eventually the familiar images of movies and television.

The house became a character.

Then we forgot it had ever played a different role.

By the early twentieth century, Victorian design had fallen out of favor. Features that once expressed pride and prosperity became targets for criticism. Mansard roofs and elaborate ornament could now suggest excess rather than accomplishment. Advocates of newer architecture contrasted Victorian decoration with what they considered cleaner, purer alternatives.

A house didn’t need to change owners to become unfashionable.

It only needed to remain standing while fashion moved on.

Artists helped give that rejection an emotional vocabulary. Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield portrayed Victorian houses with unsettling character. In the 1920s, these buildings increasingly appeared in literature and theater as settings associated with fear. During the 1930s, Walker Evans’s photographs of abandoned Victorian houses further reinforced the connection between these buildings and decline.

Eventually, audiences recognized the visual shorthand. Psycho and The Addams Family could draw on associations that were already established: the old, elaborate house carried a story before anyone opened the door.

That’s what caught my attention.

Before the actor spoke, before the music changed, before the camera found the mysterious upstairs window, the architecture had already introduced the possibility of trouble.

The building was doing some of the storytelling.

You may never design a tower, a mansard roof, or a porch that could comfortably accommodate the entire Addams family.

But you probably encounter the same underlying issue whenever a client responds to an image.

Those sound like design directions. Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they’re the opening lines of a story you haven’t heard yet.

Imagine showing the same enclosed porch to two clients.

One remembers summer evenings at a grandparent’s house, listening to rain while the adults talked.

The other imagines an unused room that blocks daylight from the living area.

You’re showing one space.

They’re seeing two different places.

Neither response tells you everything you need to know about the porch. Each tells you something worth discovering about the person.

And if you respond too quickly, you might solve the wrong problem.

You could eliminate the porch when the real concern was darkness. Or preserve its appearance while missing the feeling of connection that made it attractive.

The drawing is only part of the conversation.

I’m not suggesting you add “unresolved childhood issues” to your client questionnaire.

Although it might explain a few project meetings.

I am suggesting that a collection of inspiration pictures deserves more investigation than a quick inventory of materials and roof shapes.

Consider a client who brings you a photograph of an elaborate older home.

You notice the window proportions, the porch columns, and the roofline.

Your client may barely notice those things.

They may be imagining a house where people linger. A front door guests actually use. A place that feels established rather than temporary.

Or they may simply like the green paint.

You won’t know until you ask.

That’s the risk of treating an image as a complete instruction. It can feel specific while leaving the most important information unstated.

“Make it look like this” is not always the same request as “Make it feel like this.”

Your opportunity is to discover which request you’re hearing.

Here’s a small exercise to try at your next design conversation.

Ask your client to describe how they want their home to feel using three words (e.g., Welcoming, Peaceful, Connected).

Then run those words through a quick translation:

• Ask for an example: "Tell me about a place that feels welcoming to you."
• Identify the feature: Is it the visible entrance, sheltered approach, or comfortable seating?
• Connect to a decision: Write down what you intend to do and why.
• Confirm interpretation: "When you said welcoming, is this what you had in mind?"

You’ll walk away with three desired feelings mapped directly to three explicit design decisions—and ensure you're solving the right problem before drawing a single line.

The measurable result is simple: three desired feelings connected to three explicit design decisions.

You can put the results on a single page.

Those are possibilities, not universal definitions.

Your client may mean something entirely different.

That’s why the last step matters.

You’re not assigning meaning to their words. You’re checking whether you understood them.

This weekend, a house may acquire plastic spiders, a skeleton on the porch, and enough artificial cobwebs to suggest a serious maintenance problem.

For a few nights, its owners will deliberately tell you a different story about the place.

But the more interesting transformation happened long before the decorations arrived: houses built for ordinary life became some of our most recognizable symbols of the extraordinary.

That’s a useful reminder of the responsibility behind your drawings.

You’re arranging rooms, roofs, openings, and materials. You’re also helping someone create a place they will interpret through memory, expectation, and daily life.

So this week, try the three-word conversation on one project.

Listen for what sits behind the adjective.

You may discover that your client doesn’t really want an old house, a modern house, or even the house in the photograph.

They want a place that makes them feel a certain way.

Your job is to understand that feeling well enough to give it a home.

Preferably without anything mysterious living upstairs.