Dream House: A Novel

(Hardback)

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Lush with sensory detail and emotional complexity, Dream House is about family, home, and an architects journey to understand the crippling hold one house has on her.

In the months following her parents fatal car accident in Maine, architect Gina Gilbert is coming apart: anxious with her two young children, alienated by her clients grand house dreams, and no longer certain she feels at home in San Francisco. While she and her sister Cassie are cleaning out their childhood home on the coast of Maine, they stir up painful memories and resentments over family possessions. A legendary collection of historically significant letters is missing from the artifacts they unearth, supporting a decades-old suspicion that their aunt or estranged cousin has stolen them.

Threatened by the loss of the old house and its extraordinary seaside landscape, Gina finds her heart swinging wildly between Maine and California, creating conflict with her husband, Paul. To learn what the Maine house means to her, she approaches it objectively, as an architect, bringing it to life on paper. Her familys story unfolds room by room: the darkroom from which her gentle but passive father, Ron, ran his photography business, the kitchen where her volatile mother, Eleanor, toiled under the weight of dashed dreams. As children, Gina and Cassie warily navigated rooms permeated with toxic secrets hobbling Eleanor and Rons marriage.

As Gina deconstructs the house, startling truths are revealed, changing family history and allowing Gina and Cassie to begin healing family wounds. Gina has the chance to search the recesses of her heart, too, discovering within her a vitalizing compassion and an awakened understanding of what makes a house a home.

Catherine Armsden's fascination with architecture was ignited during her childhood growing up among the weather-beaten houses of coastal Maine. Educated in New England, she moved to San Francisco in 1983 with her husband, Lewis Butler, where they co-founded Butler Armsden Architects.
Dream House is her debut novel.

Reviews

REVIEWS

"Vividly written, with a strong sense of place, this is an affecting...
first novel." Kirkus Reviews

Booklist called Dream House "a story ultimately about love in its various forms and the peace it offers."

Amazon named it one of the Best Books of November for Fiction & Literature!

One of the special pleasures of Dream House is the way it illuminates the surprising power of the dwellings that shape our lives. With an architect's eye for the complexities of the spaces we inhabit and a poets gift for language, Catherine Armsden confronts, dissects, and embraces the very idea of home: what it means to have one, to lose one, and ultimately, to make one of our own choosing. But this is just one of many reasons to read this gorgeous novel. Read it for its wisdom. Read it for its love of language. Read it for its faith in family ties. Read it to be changed forever.

Anita Amirrezvani, author of The Blood of Flowers and Equal of the Sun



Dream House is an emotionally rich, haunting dreamscape of a novel upon which Catherine Armsden observes her characters' small victories, tender griefs, delicate failures and ultimately their inextinguishable, labyrinthian love for one another. In a way reminiscent of Atwood's complex psychological dramas, Armsden investigates the relationship between truth and memory, creating each room of her imagined house with an exacting architect's eye and filling the empty spaces with hard-won love, clear-eyed healing, and a nuanced understanding of human nature. A novel that details how waves of time and history erode and support our sense of reality, Dream House depicts the layered intricacies of intergenerational family life in unsparing, compassionate detail. It is as lush as it is wise.

Laurie Fox, author of My Sister From the Black Lagoon and The Lost Girls


Are we ever ready to let go of the house that helped form us Armsdens Dream House reads like a memory, a whisper of sea secrets, family hurts, misunderstandings, lost treasures, and love. Poignant, elegant, and told in shimmering prose, Armsden reminds us that in order to negotiate the future, we must make peace with the pastbecause as long as the house endures, so do the little hurts; a house never forgets.

Tess Uriza Holthe, author of The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes and When the Elephants Dance


A deeply intelligent and psychologically complex novel. With architectural precision, Armsden renders the structure of a house and a family as if the house were not only a machine for living in, as Le Corbusier said, but also an insight machine, illuminating the mad attic of the psyche.

Carolyn Cooke, Author of The Bostons and Daughters of the Revolution


"Richly rewarding...a must read for anyone thinking of building...Architectural quotations...open each chapter and reinforce the theme of the house as a vessel for our emotions. The title is especially apt, for a house is always a dream: about what it was and what it could be."
Dan Gregory, Houseplans.com, author of From The Land: The Architecture of
Backen, Gillam & Kroeger

Author Bio

Catherine Armsden'sintrigue with architecture was ignited during her childhood growing up amongst the weather-beaten 18th and 19th century houses in Maine, where she was raised. She was educated in New England and then moved with her husband, Lewis Butler, to San Francisco in 1984 where they co-founded Butler Armsden Architects, a residential architecture firm. This is her debut novel.