You can't remodel your location...

When we bought our current house, there were a lot that we felt needed to be done to it to make it the kind of place we wanted, but there were things that made it worth it. This picture shows one of them...

Our master bedroom has a deck that overlooks the woods behind our house. Here is the view we have during a light snow this morning. No amount of remodeling can produce this, and it's a key feature of our home. Our house is located on a slope, which puts our deck rail better than 30 feet above the base of the trees. In the book Patterns of Home, this is termed "Refuge and Outlook".

From the Architecture Week article link:

• One of the fundamental pleasures that shelter offers is the sense of a solid, stable, and protected place from which you can look out over a "great beyond." This can be vividly experienced on a hike in the hills, when you finally arrive at a stone lodge that provides shelter and a view out over the landscape below. Good homes invite their inhabitants to enact this drama daily in a variety of spaces.