House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  * * *

  —

  THE FLOW OF OUR HOUSE in Port Townsend had been interrupted twice since it was built in 1909. The first occurrence was when the front staircase was removed. I’d asked around, and a neighbor told me that the previous owners had done it because they wanted more room for their Christmas tree. It seemed hard to imagine, but the staircase was definitely gone, leaving the living room tilting psychologically as well as physically.

  The absence of the stairway, and the definition to the entry it had provided, also eliminated any sense of a welcome. You opened the front door into the upper quadrant of a big, impersonal rectangle of a room. It was entry as anti-invitation—something those piles of trash had reinforced but was still present now without them.

  Just as importantly, the traffic patterns of the house had been radically changed, leaving a hidden set of cramped back stairs as the only access to the second story. The message embedded in the new floor plan was clear: Keep out. Given the reclusive nature of the previous owner, it made sense. But it wasn’t doing the house any favors.

  The other interruption to the flow came from us when Ben cut off the narrow kitchen and the back porch that was connected to it. He’d used a chain saw, standing high up on a ladder, and it was like watching someone slice through a very moist cake. The whole thing fell off the side of the house, landing on the ground with a wet smack. The activity was deeply satisfying, and, given the levels of rot and decomposition we’d found, it was the only thing we could have done, but it left us with a few problems. Before that point, the angular box of our Foursquare had been softened by the presence of the front and back porches, their roofs extending the gentle slope of the hipped version above. When we removed the kitchen and the back porch, however, we also destroyed the symmetry they had provided.

  Nature and humans love symmetry; research suggests that evenly proportioned facial features send a message of health and good genes, and I believe that building proportions are no different. Balanced structures simply feel stronger—if you need convincing, just try to imagine the White House with only one wing. With our back porch and kitchen gone, the abruptness of the west side of our house was disconcerting. Whether inside or out, people instinctively kept looking for what wasn’t there.

  And then there was a second problem: we now had no kitchen.

  Ben and I had played around with plans for a new kitchen in a newly built room—full of light, a place to gather—but given all the infrastructure costs we were racking up, we knew we were just fantasizing. Around and around we went, with no logical or emotionally satisfying conclusion to be found.

  * * *

  —

  ENTER ROMAN.

  “So, I had some ideas…” he said as he walked into the house for our meeting.

  I was starting to understand that Roman often started discussions this way. He pulled a large roll of drawings out of his worn leather briefcase and unfurled them across our dirty but trash-free carpet. They were initial ideas at this stage, but hand drawn, precise, and elegant. A work of art.

  “Walk me through it?” I asked him.

  “Let’s start with the living room,” he said, and pointed at the drawings to a set of stairs.

  Ben and I had agreed that we wanted to rebuild the front stairway—it was our one extravagance, but we believed it would make the most difference to the house. When Roman showed me the staircase on paper, it made the rightness of the decision real. The steps rose, turning at a landing at the halfway point, then disappeared like a secret invitation. They were graceful, but they also gave weight and definition to the north side of the room once again.

  “I added this, too. I wanted to give you more of an entrance,” Roman said, pointing to a framed opening that divided the ungainly rectangular front room into two parts: an entry with the staircase on the north side, and a living room to the south. It was strange how quickly I relaxed as I looked at the entry; I might have expected the opposite, given the square footage we were losing from the living room, but that wasn’t the case. Like porches, entries are important architectural elements that subliminally affect our relationship both with a house and the people within it.

  One of the things that had always been difficult about our home in Seattle was that, like many Arts and Crafts houses, the front door was centered on the house, and entering it dropped you directly into the middle of the living room. Arranging furniture was a nightmare, as was greeting or saying goodbye to guests. No one knew what to do. At the end of an evening, people would stand by the front door, sweating in their coats, circling around like flies. It was as if they didn’t know how to leave. Evenings always seemed to end with a whimper, a series of less and less enthusiastic hugs, rather than the bang of a happy farewell. The house in Port Townsend had presented a similar problem, with its large amorphous living room.

  But with Roman’s plan, we had an entry—a place to shed your public self along with your coat and become part of the family. And there was a chance for anyone to be family, too—the open invitation in those stairs told you so.

  “I love it,” I said to Roman.

  “The trick,” he told me, “is to keep the finish work consistent.” The frame that partitioned the entry and living room included half-height bookshelves on either side, each with a column rising from the top of the shelves toward the ceiling. While the main opening provided you entry to the living room, the open spaces above the bookcases offered two additional intimate views. Caught up as we usually are with exterior views, it is easy to overlook the potential of interior ones—which can be particularly important in the Northwest, where our skies can be grey and cloudy a good portion of the year.

  I noticed Roman had also taken out the pocket doors that originally divided the living and dining rooms and replaced them with the same framed-opening-with-bookshelves concept. The repetition created a pattern, a visual trick that established a feeling of coherence even as it kept your eye moving forward.

  Recurring elements are an especially effective way to create a sense of flow, and most houses have their own particular features. Arched doorways, double-hung windows, hefty baseboards, a geometric pattern that shows up in everything from tiles to leaded glass—each becomes part of the signature, or refrain, of the house. Noting and replicating a house’s signature features can help create a seamless transition between new and old in a renovation.

  While Roman’s framed openings were not currently present in the house, they were completely consistent with its vintage, and their repetition created a new refrain that was then repeated throughout the main floor, tying it all together.

  “Look here.” Roman pointed at the plans to a set of French doors at the south end of the living room, where the chimney had once been. The glass doors were flanked on either side by the two narrow windows that had previously surrounded the fireplace.

  I looked up to see how the plan would manifest in reality and saw how the blank space where the chimney had once been now framed a view of Mount Rainier, far off in the distance. It was a worthy successor to the fireplace, I had to admit.

  “Keep looking,” Roman said, pulling my attention back to the plans. I peered more closely, and then I saw it. The dimensions of the French doors matched the framed openings between the main rooms, and the windows on either side echoed the spaces above the bookshelves. He’d used the same theme he’d already established, only this time he gave us the exterior view.

  He smiled when he saw me catch it.

  “Details,” he said. “It’s all in the details.”

  * * *

  —

  NOW IT WAS TIME FOR the tough stuff. “So what are we going to do about the kitchen?” I asked, taking a deep breath.

  “I thought we’d put it here.” He motioned toward the northwest corner of the house.

  My breath came out in a rush. “The yuck room?” I said. What was he thinking? It was the only dark, isolated spot in a house otherwise filled with light and views. Besides—it was the
yuck room.

  “I spend a lot of time in the kitchen,” I said. How could he have gotten me so wrong?

  “Oh, well, we’ll open it up,” Roman said amiably, pointing to the plans once again.

  And suddenly there it was, a wonderful square space with a large opening on the south wall, connecting it to the dining room. The opening was framed like the other two, but this time there was a kitchen bar providing a partial division, keeping the mess of the kitchen out of sight while allowing the cook full access to the view.

  As I looked at the plans, I could feel all the darkness of that room fade away, and the four squares of the house fall into place with a satisfying thump. The rooms still performed the function of four strong columns—entryway, living room, dining room, and kitchen psychologically holding up the house—but the flow between them would be easy and unencumbered. In fact, the only interior door on the main floor was to the basement. And yet each room had its own character, was its own chapter in the larger story of the house.

  “Wow,” I said. I thought of all the hours Ben and I had spent working on the problem of the kitchen, never once reaching this simple and elegant solution.

  “It just made sense,” Roman said, shrugging.

  The design was ingenious, but it still left a plywood wall on the west side of the house where the old kitchen had been. I glanced over; I couldn’t help it. The lack of balance kept drawing my attention like a loose tooth.

  Roman caught me looking. “I thought you said you couldn’t afford—”

  “No, you’re right,” I said.

  Actually, with the kitchen situation solved, we no longer needed to rebuild a room there, not in any practical sense. And yet I could feel the house yearning in that direction.

  Roman saw my expression.

  “How about this?” he asked. “We’ll go ahead and put a frame for a door inside the wall now. When you’ve got the money, you’ll have a head start.”

  It reminded me of Aravena’s buildings in Chile, the way the open spaces between them became a belief in the future, and in the meantime, a promise.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “OKAY.” ROMAN RETURNED TO the plans in front of us. “Want to look at the upstairs?” He flipped to the next page. On the second floor, too, we had wanted to make some adjustments. The original bathroom had consisted of two four-foot-wide rooms centered on the south wall of the house. One slim and gloomy rectangle held a toilet, while the other contained a sink and the shower with its rubber-glove-covered handles. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like the idea of ever taking a shower in there; it seemed a strange use of space and a waste of a view.

  But there had been another option. The northeast bedroom was the one with the least view, and it was about to lose a chunk of its space to the rebuilt stairway, anyway.

  “What if we turned that bedroom into a bathroom?” I’d asked Roman, and he’d nodded thoughtfully, then played around with plumbing issues in his head until coming up with a solution that would work.

  That had just left the question of what to do with the square footage where the bathroom had been. Ben and I were in favor of adding it on to the main square of the master bedroom, creating a narrower adjoining sitting area that looked out at the view. Roman had been hesitant about the idea from the very beginning, without ever saying exactly why. He’d talked about moving doors, adding partial walls, anything to juggle the shape. I could see on the plans now that he was still working with the issue. I began to wonder—as none of his suggestions were necessarily structural in nature—if perhaps there was a less scientific reason that he didn’t feel comfortable talking about.

  I decided to fall on my own sword.

  “You know,” I ventured, “I don’t know much about this stuff, but I’ve heard that an L-shaped room is supposed to be bad feng shui.” Roman was looking at me curiously, but not leaping into the conversation. I soldiered on. “I mean, apparently a room that’s lacking a corner—in this case, the marriage corner—could be unpromising for a master bedroom.”

  He nodded. “Well, you know Port Townsend is terrible for marriages.” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t have said that, but it’s true. You need to have a really strong marriage to live here.”

  I knew Roman was divorced; I wasn’t sure what I should say.

  “I know what I’m talking about. I have access to information.” His face was serious.

  Ah, I thought. Insider architect knowledge. Architects so often end up knowing things about their clients that they might not divulge to their best friends. What a strange and unusual situation that is.

  I jumped at the chance to talk to Roman about it.

  “So…”

  “It’s true,” he said. “Port Townsend is actually a locus of sexual dysfunction.”

  I hadn’t expected that. “Well,” I said slowly, “it is a small town. I’m sure it feels that way.” Poor Roman, I thought. He must have had some incredibly difficult clients.

  “No.” Roman’s tone was patient. “There are forces at work. It’s like how the Middle East will always be at war, because it’s a locus for conflict in the world. We know this, you see, because any time an intelligent species progresses past a certain point, they are monitored.”

  Oh.

  “I take it that it wouldn’t be people doing this monitoring?” I asked.

  “Oh no.” He smiled. “It’s nonphysically based universal entities, parts of the Universal Family.”

  “Now,” he said, turning easily to the plans, “do you think we need two thirty-two-inch windows here? We’re getting a little tight on the energy calculations.”

  * * *

  —

  I CALLED BEN AFTER Roman left.

  “Our architect believes in aliens,” I said.

  He laughed—he actually laughed. “How are the plans?” he asked.

  “Gorgeous. Brilliant.”

  “Okay then.”

  “But—”

  “How tall are the doors?” he said.

  “Standard height.” This was the second conversation of the day that was not going in the direction I’d thought it would.

  “Well,” Ben said, and I could hear a teasing note enter his voice, “if he was really thinking about future resale, he would have made them three-feet tall, right? He designed this for us. We should consider ourselves lucky.”

  That is the thing about Ben. He does tend to put things in perspective.

  ROOTS

  A lasting architecture has to have roots.

  —I. M. Pei

  WE WERE WELL AND truly into summer, and we still did not have an approved foundation plan. Ben’s and my original and hopelessly unrealistic schedule had us finished with the entire renovation by the end of August. It seemed likely we’d still be hanging high above the ground at that point, having lost precious months of good building weather. Ben, undaunted, used his days on-site to continue removing the rest of the heavy asbestos shingles from the now much-taller house, bringing each one down the ladder, then starting back up again, a living incarnation of Sisyphus. I loaded the shingles in the mandated hazardous-materials bags that ripped with every sharp edge. The work was ridiculously frustrating, and it terrified me to see Ben so far off the ground—but he would just say he’d rather work high now than in the rain later.

  On the days when I was out there by myself, I headed to the lower garden to work on the orchard, the house dangling far above me. There is something unnerving about looking up to see your house floating above your head, like the moment in between tossing your laughing baby into the air and feeling her body in your hands once more. Neither houses nor babies are meant to fly; we know this instinctively, and yet still we send them skyward. Whether this is a sign of stupidity or faith depends, I suppose, on your ability to catch whatever falls. Those days, my confidence in both was rather shaken.

  But the orchard needed help. The ivy had so completely covered the trees that it was
hard sometimes to believe they were there at all. There was something almost seductive in the ivy’s persistence, the wavelike feeling of all that green coming in, washing over. Standing in the orchard, it was easy to imagine that a nap taken there could last a hundred years.

  * * *

  —

  IVY IS A PLANT OF opportunity, a natural invader brought to this country by settlers from Europe in the early eighteenth century. Its human history goes back all the way to the Romans and Greeks, whose poets wore it like a crown. Later, it was donned by those who believed it could help mitigate the effect of intoxication—which explains the ivy painted on signs over the doors of some English pubs. There was even a time when ivy was draped across houses and churches at Christmas, until the practice was denounced as pagan.

  Perhaps it was the accumulated associations that made the plant something a settler would want to bring to a new country. Perhaps the very vibrancy of the plant was encouraging to those facing a challenging new landscape. In the end, however, ivy latched on to this new country and dug in.

  In temperate climates like the Pacific Northwest, ivy has an advantage over the deciduous trees it loves to climb, as ivy is able to photosynthesize throughout the winter, gaining ground and strength every year as the trees sleep. Ivy cares almost nothing for seasons; it simply grows, as high as ninety feet, snuffing out the light necessary for the understory of forests and creating what have been termed ivy deserts. Although technically not a parasite—its vines do not penetrate the bark of the tree it invades—its accumulated weight can bring down a tree. Given all the assembled evidence, there is little reason to continue planting the stuff, and yet we do, watching with nostalgic awe as it climbs houses, and takes over trees.