* * *
—
MY LIFE HAD BECOME full of details in those days. The crew was doing infrastructure work—plumbing, framing. What they needed from me was decisions. There were choices to be made on everything from tile to carpet, cabinet styles and configurations, drawer pulls, doorknobs, sinks, faucets, appliances, vent hoods, countertops, backsplashes, toilets, tubs, towel bars, and paint colors. I was becoming the queen of Consumer Reports, and I spent entire days in the showrooms and discount building-supply outlets tucked deep in the industrial parks south of downtown Seattle.
If you have the money, you can turn all those decisions over to a designer, but I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. For me, a house comes alive in its details. The matching of trim work from one room to the next, the unexpected pleasure of a faucet handle that feels like water itself in your hand—the extra effort creates a sense of a life well lived and a house well loved.
That care in the details was one of the things I’d admired most about Italy. While we were living in Bergamo, workers had dug up one of the main streets in the ancient upper town, in order to do some sewer repairs. It took almost the entire two years we were there, as they painstakingly removed and then later replaced the cobblestones in their intricate fan-shaped pattern. Swapping them with asphalt would have been much easier and faster, and certainly less wear and tear on the cars that would travel across it. But while there was grumbling about the congestion the roadwork created, there was never a question of doing it differently. I still remember the day the street was finished, looking down that expanse of undulating stones, the grace of it, like a river made of rock.
It was something I mourned when we returned to our native country. While I love the American drive to get things done, I deeply missed the other—the slow slip of an artful detail into my consciousness, the softening of my soul that happened at the sight of a curve in a stone wall when a straight line would have done. I wanted to give that kind of attention to my house. I’m sure there were times when all my research and trips to one store after another seemed obsessive—and yet to me what I was doing was no different than a carpenter sanding down a piece of wood until it shines, or a writer editing a sentence until it sings. There is beauty in seeing the small things, in taking care of something. I’ve always thought that phrasing odd—taking care. I’ve always thought it should be giving.
* * *
—
IN FRANCE, THERE IS a small group of master craftsmen who are called compagnons, a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages. Compagnons—or companions—spend a minimum of five years learning their craft, traveling from town to town to work under different experts.
At the end of the training, each compagnon must create a masterpiece that displays their talents. The tradition among woodworkers is to create a fabulously detailed miniature staircase, only inches tall. It is painstaking, precise work, and the result is a piece that is breathtaking, fit for fairies. And yet those tiny staircases provide a function for us, as well. They are proof of what we humans are capable of when we choose to love right down to the smallest details.
* * *
—
IN MANY WAYS, MY MOTHER instilled that passion for details in me. She was an art major in college, and a fashion designer before she had children. I still have a memory of being some five years old, twirling about the living room in one of the cocktail dresses she’d designed, its blue scalloped edges floating about my feet, every stitch flawless.
She could orchestrate the schedules of five children without getting a run in her stockings, lead a Girl Scout troop, bake cakes for every birthday, and decorate the dining room with streamers and balloons—all while keeping our house meticulously clean. She’s the one that taught me to use a toothbrush to clean the grout between tiles, and to check with a glove for dust on a baseboard. She would have made an incredible project manager.
But there are downsides to having a detail-oriented parent, as my own kids would tell you. There are positive details and negative ones, and my mother could correct you five different ways during a task as simple as making coffee. I don’t believe she even knew she was doing it, but it happened all the same.
She was a woman of her time, her wellspring of creativity and intelligence rerouted into the river of motherhood. She climbed over its banks the moment her children were deemed grown-up enough, getting a master’s degree and then working in art museums, where she organized shows and sent the best thank-you notes anyone ever received. She loved us, but you could see what working gave her: the excitement, the stimulation, that free-ranging feeling, powerful and clean. There was a time when I begrudged it—not the work, but the joy, and the fact that it didn’t come from us—until I was a stay-at-home mother and understood that desire myself, saw my own childhood expression on my children’s faces, looking up at me.
So many of us declare that we will not become our parents. But they are the house we are born into. Their lives, their rules, their loves are the walls that surround us, make us. No matter what, we will always be renovations, never a clean slate. The trick, as with any renovation, is keeping the good bones.
And so I take my love of good details from my mother. When I held the schedules of plumbers and framers and roofers and finances in my brain, I felt as if I could conquer the world. When I found the blue and green glass trim tiles that would add some creativity to classic white four-by-fours while still staying in my budget, I experienced a rush of joy. And as I worked on the house in Port Townsend, I finally began to understand my mother’s quest for the perfect Christmas tree—the desire to find art in the everyday, when everyday is the palette you were given.
* * *
—
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I spent my time ticking off the items on my list, while the guys banged away on the house. It took time, but bit by bit I made my way through, until finally lighting was all that was left. It wasn’t coincidental—lighting is either boringly simple or notoriously tricky, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where illumination is a precious commodity during our long, dark winters. Out here, we depend upon our electric lights psychologically as well as physically, and in the dim half of the year I would go from one to the next in our Seattle house like a child leaping from rock to rock to get across a river.
Years before we found the house in Port Townsend, I had bought a new ceiling light for our dining room in Seattle. The fixture was a fanciful thing, a globe that hung down from a crown of bronze sun rays that encircled it. It didn’t belong in that house; those Craftsman bungalows have their own style. But I wanted to put my mark on the dark wood-paneled room; I wanted to bring in the sun. It didn’t work. The globe was thick, and the light it emitted was a mere glow when a more thorough illumination was needed. But the fixture had stayed up there on the ceiling in all its irony because I couldn’t bear to take it down.
My first decision in choosing the lighting for the house in Port Townsend was to bring in that fixture, so it could go where it belonged, in a bright and open dining room. Looking out at the water and sky, it would be a partner to the real sun, not an unsuccessful act of defiance. And in the evenings, its glow, augmented by candles, would encourage long, slow dinners.
That just left some twenty-five other fixtures to find. With our budget at the screaming point, I decided to go simple and consistent with the bedrooms—choosing basic ceiling lights that matched the era. But when it came to the living room, I was stumped. In that most public room of the house, I wanted something special, something that sent a message the way the sun fixture did.
One Thursday morning in early September, I went to my local lighting store in Seattle. Only a few weeks before, standing on the same sidewalk on a hot and cloudless summer afternoon, I could not make myself go in and consider a future need for artificial illumination. But on that Thursday, the weather had turned cold and soggy, and the radiance of the store had an almost magnetic attraction. I walked inside among the ceiling fixtures, looking up.
When lights are turned off, the variation among the types of glass tends to blur to a fairly homogenous white, and the glass can take a poor back seat to the charms of the metal components, fashioned in Arts and Crafts perpendiculars or spiraling ironworked leaf and flower constructions. The metal shapes evoke cultural memories, of Versailles, Williamsburg, turn-of-the-century New York—a panorama of history hung from the ceiling of a store. It is easy to become lost among them, and the glass can become overlooked.
But when you turn a light on, everything is different. There are subtleties and surprises that have been waiting in the dark. A plain fixture can change personality when illuminated—become a gift or a private joke released only by the interplay between light and glass. It takes an agile mind to match glass to metal in a way that causes them to enhance each other. Each combination is different, and so I stood in the store and pulled the dangling chains on and off.
A half hour later, I had illuminated some fifty different fixtures. None of them seemed right. I told myself I would try one more, and then I would stop for the day. The fixture above me was not flashy or ornate, with just a delicately carved dark brown knob at the bottom that looked more like wood than metal. The knob held in place a seemingly opaque glass bell that curved outward toward the ceiling, then flared like a skirt. I almost didn’t turn the fixture on—it seemed too ordinary to waste my last attempt on—but then something made me tug on the chain.
The light glowed, and the sight made my breath catch. There were clouds in the glass, swirling up the sides and then out to the edges. Light danced behind and between them. It was ethereal, balletic, movement and light and warmth all at the same time.
Seeing it took my mind back to a wet November morning in Italy. On that day, I’d been walking through the old upper town, the cobblestones damp and cold beneath my feet. When I’d entered the piazza, I saw a strange sight—a couple ballroom dancing in elegant clothes, oddly elevated above a crowd of people. The couple was not tall or on a stage, I realized; they were on stilts. He was in a black tuxedo with elongated tails, she in a long white dress with a skirt that flowed about her like a cloud. Back and forth they moved, apart from each other, then together, around and around in circles. Then he lifted her up over his shoulder, the stilts and the cloud skirt following after. A moment later, she was down again, and the music filled the air like movement itself.
Who were they? Why were they there, dancing on stilts, on stones? It didn’t matter. They were magic, a moment of unexpected beauty on a dark day.
* * *
—
THE OWNER OF THE LIGHT STORE came up next to me. “I was wondering if you’d end up with that one,” he said, smiling. “That’s one of my favorites. It comes from France.”
I imagined it in the living room in Port Townsend, hanging from the ceiling above the windows that looked out to the sky and the water. I was willing to throw the rest of our lighting budget into the bargain-warehouse category to get this one light. But the store owner smiled again.
“I’ll give you the builder’s discount,” he said. “You look like you’ll take good care of it.”
I paid him, and he put the fixture in a box, where it lay, quiet and still. Once the drywall was in, we would hang it in the living room. It would be the clouds to the sun of the dining room fixture. A conversation between weather patterns. A dance on the ceiling above our heads.
As I walked to the car, I found myself wondering if anyone besides me would ever notice that light fixture on my living room ceiling. My guess was that most people would not—but I was willing to bet they’d feel it, all the same.
When I was in real estate, there were what I called “emotional houses,” the kind that could inspire bidding wars even in the slowest of economies. As far as I could tell, it was never a house’s perfection or trendiness that brought out such enthusiasm. Instead it was a quality I could describe only as an unexpected generosity, that love of a house that goes right down to the details. There is an intimacy to this kind of caretaking. It is not necessary. It is not pragmatic. But when we are near it, it creates a desire to reach beyond stability, and utility, to venustas—a beauty that draws us in and makes us want to stay.
THE ROOF
Why are we so vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the places we inhabit are saying?
—Alain de Botton
TECHNICALLY, WE DID HAVE a roof on the house in Port Townsend, but a tarp would have provided more protection. The shingles had been overtaken by moss, and what few remained had a disconcerting tendency to let go in stormy weather and fly about the neighborhood like disoriented crows, their curling black edges flapping in the wind.
We could not move forward in the renovation without a solid roof—there would be no point in putting in systems or finishes that would then be ruined by leaks. But the foundation had taken so long that we had sunk to the bottom of the roofers’ priority list, and now the autumn rains had started early, which made the roofers’ schedule, always weather-dependent, even more unpredictable.
But finally, the roofers called—we had a date. Excited by the prospect of forward movement after so much waiting, George wrote a schedule on the interior of a wall, an exhilarating succession of dominoes—electrical, insulation, drywall, tile, cabinets, carpet—each one ticking us toward the finish line. An ambitious thing, it had us painted by Thanksgiving, trimmed by Christmas.
We forgot a major superstition of house renovation: Never write a schedule on a wall. Especially not with a Sharpie.
The roofing company canceled, set a new date, then canceled, again and again. Once more, we were playing the waiting game.
* * *
—
IF A HEARTH IS the heart of a house and the job of the foundation is to hold it up, then the role of a roof is to keep us safe. The book Patterns of Home declares, “More than any other single element, the form of the roof…carries the look and meaning of shelter, of home.” In American Sign Language, the word home is based on the sign for roof, a gable made by the fingertips of two hands, protecting the space in between.
The reason roofs are peaked, sloped, and angled is to hold back the weather. Snow and rain slide down and fall off, leaving the inside of the house untouched. In their own way, roofs protect us from the weight of the world, while their shape sends the message that we can survive whatever comes down upon us. The Chinese ideogram series that ends up with family begins with the gable of a roof.
The idea is so iconic that when Le Corbusier built his houses for workers, a streamlined series of flat-roofed boxes, the workers then quickly turned around and added the elements that meant “home” to them—shutters, porches, and, of course, peaked roofs. Critics were appalled, but there is no dissuading us from our basic emotional needs. Without that feeling of protection, it’s hard to sleep, to live, to build the family that grows beneath the roof.
* * *
—
IT WAS ALMOST THE middle of September. I woke up in our house in Seattle to the sound of our daughter running down the hall.
“Someone’s flown a plane into a building in New York,” she yelled out.
Groggy with sleep, I suggested that perhaps one of her friends was playing a joke on her. But Kate was insistent, and we turned on the television just in time to watch the first tower of the World Trade Center fall. In that moment, our narrative as Americans was changed.
* * *
—
WE CREATE STORIES WITH beginnings, middles, and ends, and then cast them out into the world, talismans against the reality that life does not always tie up neatly, that it can come at you sideways, take away your breath, your life, your sustaining belief that everything will end up okay. We write our stories on paper, like wishes on New Year’s, and send them into the world.
Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the twin towers, was, ironically enough, the same man who had created Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis, the low-income housing complex that was demolished so
soon after its creation. In Yamasaki’s narrative, the towers would be a symbol of peace that would give humankind a sense of pride and nobility. He designed the towers, what would be the tallest buildings in the world at that time, to be ageless and immune to the forces of nature. What he never counted on was man. One of the terrorists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks was an Egyptian who had studied architecture himself and saw a different story in the twin towers—the antithesis of communal marketplaces, a way of life he believed was threatened by corporate culture in the United States. Two narratives for the two towers.
* * *
—
I WAS SUPPOSED TO go out to Port Townsend the day the towers fell, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t want to leave my family. I spent the day watching the news, as the second tower came down, then the third plane, and the fourth. Everything was falling from the sky, taking lives and our collective sense of security with it.
I went the following day, but it was a strange and disconcerting journey. The ferry had a military escort cruising alongside it. Once I reached land again, I found that the roads were lined with US flags: big ones fluttering on poles, and stiff little plastic ones attached to mailboxes. I drove between them, red, white, and blue, stark against the grey weather, as I listened to the news.
I took the same route through town that I always did—ending in the road that led straight up the hill, with the house greeting you from a distance. The alternate route was a circuitous one, with the house coming as a surprise at the end of a particularly large curve. It was an equally pretty option, but I always took the first one; I wanted to know, blocks before I arrived, that the house was still standing. I needed time to prepare myself if it wasn’t. Over the months we’d owned the house, taking the first route had turned into a kind of superstition—as long as I went that way, the house would be there, I told myself.
House Lessons Page 15