Poetic Spaces - Backyard dream houses.

From poetry to utility: playhouse, pool house, meditation room, reading retreat, studio, garden getaway, hideaway…. What do you dream it to be? Poetic Spaces are buildings on a small scale, tiny enough to embrace a child, and roomy enough to enchant an adult. They are one-of-a-kind functional architectural fantasies, conceived, designed, and built by Cape Cod artist Jody Melander.

My first house began with a set of old casement windows. They were just under five feet tall, and when I saw them I thought “French doors”!  
I had an immediate, detailed image of a Victorian-style cottage, with gingerbread, a front porch, and these doors on the gable end, and I had an overwhelming need to build it. I think there’s an element of “playing house” in my little house building. As a long-term resident of the Cape who missed the dream of buying real estate when prices were still “real,” I can design and build on a small scale what I am currently unable to do in a normal size. And because I’m working small, I’m limited only by imagination. Fortunately I have nieces (then two, now three), so my compulsion to create resulted in an unparalleled gift opportunity. I built them the house I’d envisioned, rented a truck and brought it to Pennsylvania, and reassembled it in their backyard. It’s been the scene of tea parties and birthday parties and slumber parties. My other sister insists that her only chance to one-up me is to buy the kids a pony.

“Poetic Spaces” also had a dream-like beginning. It was born in 2006, when a poet friend saw a picture of my nieces’ house and unexpectedly gave me startup money for a tiny house construction business. Obviously “poetic” celebrates the generosity of that gift. I love the fact too that the roots of the word “poetic” lie in the ancient Greek for ‘inventive’. These are spaces that I invent, and I hope they will be places for invention and creativity in others. “Poetic Spaces” is also a nod to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote (in his book by that name) “The house shelters dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”. My buildings are ‘backyard dream houses’, both in the usual sense (although on a tiny scale), and also in the sense that each is a place for dreaming and imagining, whether as a child’s playhouse or an adult’s retreat. I hope that they delight the user as much as their creation has delighted me.