Seeing Homes Through a New Lens With Kirsten Dirksen & Nicolás Boullosa

Housing is much in the headlines these days. Rarely, however, do we learn about the unusual, resourceful ways people have created homes, often under challenging circumstances. 

On Wednesday, February 4, at 7 pm, Arts & Culture will feature Berkeley residents Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa, co-authors of the book Life-Changing Homes:Eco-Friendly Designs That Promote Well-Being. Drawing on their decades of documenting unconventional dwellings and the people who inhabit them, Dirksen and Boullosa will discuss how homes can serve as turning points, reshaping not only how we live, but who we become.

Tickets for their talk, available on Eventbrite, are $5 for club members and students and $10 for non-members. Please register early so we can be sure to accommodate everyone comfortably. 

Best known for their long-running, joint video series on Dirksen's YouTube channel and their joint website Faircompanies, the couple has traveled the world filming self-built houses, adaptive reuse projects, co-living experiments, and off-grid retreats — often created by people in the midst of personal or societal transition. In Life-Changing Homes, the authors look beyond design aesthetics to ask deeper questions about autonomy, belonging, and the relationship between shelter and identity.

Dirksen and Boullosa will share stories from Life-Changing Homes, reflecting on why certain spaces emerge during periods of crisis, reinvention, or quiet rebellion. They also will discuss how the search for home has become increasingly urgent in this era of rising housing costs, social fragmentation, and environmental uncertainty. Finally, they will connect their book’s global stories to Berkeley’s own tradition of architectural experimentation and cultural dissent.

The couple, who have three children, aged 13 to 18, have been creatively remaking their own small, two-bedroom fixer-upper in South Berkeley that they bought two years ago. As they explained in a recent cover story in The Berkeley Voice, their house, built in 1908,  has required “its own innovative, ongoing renovations, including combining the kitchen and laundry room and converting an unheated, unfinished attic into the master bedroom.”

A native of  Palo Alto, Dirksen graduated with a BA in economics from Harvard. She started her career filming pop culture for teen shows at NBC-San Francisco and Oxygen Media. She then freelanced for other networks, including MTV, where she did music-themed stories, and went on the road with bands like Good Charlotte. An assignment for the Sundance Channel took her to Spain to interview Javier Bardem. She loved the country, decided to stay, and met Boullosa in Barcelona.Today, she devotes most of her time to filming and editing for her YouTube Channel, which has more than two million subscribers. Her first viral video, about a micro apartment in Manhattan, has been viewed 25 million times since 2010 and was featured on Good Morning, America.

Boullosa majored in journalism at the Universitat Autònoma in Barcelona. His reporting and editing has focused on the internet and new technologies along with social and economic issues. His work, he says, “is driven by a commitment to deepening public understanding of the forces that shape our well-being — technological, ecological, and cultural.” He was editor-in-chief of the magazine Digitalware, coordinator of the site iActual, director of contents for ETD Internet, and technology editor for the Spanish edition of Playboy. He has written and translated several books on topics ranging from an imagined relationship between Neanderthals and Sapiens to the future of blockchain and web3. He also is an accomplished photographer who shot most of the still photos in Life-Changing Homes.

Invite your family and friends to join you for this evening with Dirksen and Boullosa, an experience that is likely to change the way you think about what makes a house a home.