what KOHhaus means to us

When we started to consider a name for ourselves and our bathhouse project, we took into account the culture of the area before it was considered “civilized”, the people living in this beautiful place currently, and the concept of “water” and “house”. Logan Kimbrel looked up the native tribes that used the location where Lama sits now as part of their migratory cycle. Two tribes considered this place home for a large portion of the year: the Apache and the Pueblo. From this research, we began looking at the vocabulary of these tribes to determine a name pulled from their word for “water”. The Pueblo term was too long-winded for a space of only 125 square feet. We chose the Apache term “koh” for its cute size and paired it to the Dutch word for house, “haus” because we liked the way the two rolled off the tongue together. Thus our name came to be Koh Haus. When you look at our logo for our project, you will see the phonetics in parenthesis. This was the brilliant idea of Kenzie Tillett who thought the phonetics would help anyone outside of our line of thinking interpret the name and pronounce it correctly.

A citation of our research:

Lewis, Orrin. “Native American Vocabulary: Apache Words.” Native Languages of the Americas

Website. Laura Redish, June 1998. Web. 20 Jan. 2016. URL: http://www.native-languages.org/apache_words.htm