It's almost exactly a year since we bought our marvelous house in Cincinnati. As we've painted and planted and made this a home, we feel pretty certain (in a smug and irritating sort of way) that out of all the homes we looked at last spring, we chose the best one for our lifestyle.
It took me a while to see it that way, however. I fell in love with a couple of turn-of-the-century homes in Hyde Park proper (we live in Hyde Park East). One in particular evoked an almost visceral, nostalgic reaction in me; the emotions kicked in because of the pocket doors, the woodwork, the stained glass, the floating staircase. I was so infatuated that I didn't realize a fairly obvious fact until much later: it was almost a sister house of the Victorian one I grew up in. (Except not falling down around us--always a bonus.) I also didn't realize until Phil pointed out as patiently as possible that it was wholly unsuited to the way we actually live. Where would I do my work? And would we eat breakfast standing up in the tiny kitchen? (Victorians were not so much into the kitchens of today, in which you could land a helicopter on the central island.)
Phil's emotional response was to the one we wound up buying. It's brick, and he grew up in a brick house. It's a colonial, and he grew up in a colonial. See a pattern here? But he also recognized right away that this house had all of the things we needed and most of the extras we wanted. I was a little less quick on the draw. I had to put it all into a nerdy Excel spreadsheet to weigh the houses side by side. One factor was size. The Victorians look immense but actually have surprisingly little square footage. Our house looks small on the outside but its interior is like Mary Poppins's purse, thanks to an attic master bedroom and a basement office. It's a stealthy sort of house.
In House Thinking, Winifred Gallagher tackles the reasons why we have these emotional responses, and then dissects the American home room by room. It's a fascinating look at the way Americans live, and how that has changed over the decades. She starts with the entry hall and examines the need for transitional space between the home and the world. The entry is supposed to make guests and family feel welcomed and sheltered. Instead, she says, too often modern design attempts to impress them with cathedral ceilings for a too-small space, resulting in the "mine-shaft entry" that characterizes too many McMansions. She also criticizes "modern life's thralldom to the car," arguing that garages were never intended to be entryways. Amen, sister.
Other chapters tackle the living room, bedroom, bathroom, basement, home office, etc. The bathroom and kitchen chapters were especially interesting, with Gallagher tracking the modern war on germs alongside parallel historical developments in bathroom and kitchen design. She also observes something I've never noticed before: that America's rise in eating disorders directly parallels the introduction of large mirrors and scales into our home bathrooms. Probably not a coincidence. Break that mirror and pass me a Suzy-Q.
Some of the most compelling observations in the book are historical. One tidbit I learned from Gallagher that I never knew, for example, explains a whole heck of a lot about the postwar decline of America's cities. We all know about the GI Bill and how it enabled veterans to buy a home, often for the first time. But there was a catch I never realized: the homes had to be new construction. In an attempt to stimulate the postwar economy and restart the housing industry, the fine print of the GI Bill was that the money could not be used to purchase an already-existing home. Hence the flight to Levittown. Wow, talk about unintended and far-reaching social consequences.
Gallagher also ventures, a bit less successfully, into social science research to demonstrate how homes reach out to us emotionally. So we get some of the color therapy stuff and, unfortunately, a bit of feng shui silliness. But we also get interesting stats on America's well-being. In her chapter on neighborhoods, Gallagher persuasively cuts through one of my own cherished prejudices:
What most people want . . .is a big single-family home in suburbia or exurbia . . .inconveniently distant from daily destinations, hard on natural resources, and the cause of much of the unsightly, poorly planned development known as "sprawl." Academics have also theorized that these car-dependent communities encourage social isolation and consequent mental health problems, but a major study of 8,600 people in thirty-eight metropolitan areas. . . found no differences in the rate of depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being between urban and suburban residents.(p. 270)
Well, damn. I was just sure that my experience would be normative. As I said, I've been reflecting a lot on the last year, and have decided that it's been the happiest year of my entire life. I am so delighted to be living in the city, within walking distance of almost anywhere I need to go, and I'm thrilled with our house. I was just sure that life sucked in suburbia, and that as happy as I am in the city, they are correspondingly unhappy in Ben Folds's Jesusland. Apparently this is not the case, and people can be happy in many different kinds of situations. Who knew? Well, Gallagher did. It's a remarkably even-handed book even though she states her own opinions clearly. Read it!
Fascinating. I walk through my childhood homes in my mind, room by room. I'm a nut for real estate. I still remember every single house we've ever looked at as a married couple, probably thirty or so homes. Some I still walk through.
And yes, a garage is a terrible entryway. It shows us that cars are emphasized over neighbors. I'm thankful for our neighborhood where the garages are in alleyways.
Posted by: relevantgirl | June 13, 2007 at 07:28 PM
Hopefully neighborhoods in "real cities" won't die. I love our Capitol Hill neighborhood - easy walking distance everywhere, people who say hi, a real diversity of residents - I feel like we're living Jane Jacobs' principles.
Posted by: sylvia | June 13, 2007 at 07:49 PM
I still can't get over that high table from my neighbor's kitchen.
Posted by: Shawn | June 20, 2007 at 12:52 AM