Who Needs a Front Door?

Top of the Morning to ye.

Who Needs a Front Door?

You do, I assure you.

I’ve lambasted the snout house in this space before, while trying to make some sense of the forces that create it. And the A Number One reason I don’t care for the genre is that they don’t have a front door.

I use the term “Front Door” because it is a handy shorthand for the most prominent entry in a house. In a snout house, the garage door is made into the front door, ostensibly because we worship “truth” here in the States, and the truth is we arrive home by car more times than not by a large margin, so why not acknowledge it?

A. Because it’s ugly

B. Because the truth ain’t true- you haven’t arrived yet when you’re sitting in your car in the garage.

C. Because everything needs a head, or it’s visually disorienting.

Can we please take “A” as a given, and not waste time explaining it? Maybe not. People in snout houses have the same pride of ownership and regard for their dwelling as everybody else. It’s not a heresy trial here, we seek to persuade, not shout down the apostate. They just don’t think the front door is important, and don’t miss it.

Well, look at it as you may, the garage is a utility structure. Barns are utility structures. Outhouses are utility structures. Gardening sheds, even Playhouses are utility structures of a kind, and no-one thinks they can’t be picturesque, or at least presentable and appropriate in the landscape. So why beef about garages? They’re just stables for horsepower, instead of the horse power that used to be in them.

Would you nail your house onto the butt end of an outhouse? Or a barn? Or a shed? I didn’t think so. It’s not the primary occupation of the home to shelter automobiles, and to place the garage front and center is to place the human occupants lower on the domestic totem poles than the cars. That’s what makes the home visually disorienting to the passerby, as well. It shows no way for the human to enter. It confuses the viewer by offering no visual clue of the purpose of the structure but one: Park the cars indoors. And so it makes the street a forbidding scene for people, and discourages the very IDEA of approaching the occupants. And it’s the idea that matters here, not the practicality. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Cable Guy will still interrupt your dinner. Your forbidding streetscape emits a vibe to the passerby that says: No people here.

If you take a sort of Omega Man delight in looking fortresslike on the streetside, you’re fooling yourself. You’re only weeding out the nice people. The people committed to annoying you will find the entry door the designer hid around the side, or worse, knowing that you ignore that too, will walk around back to your sliding glass doors and surprise you.

You are prepared for a surprise visit from anybody 24/7, right? I was just wondering what that mirror next to the front door used to be for, the one you looked in before you opened the door. I guess people in snout houses get up early, and never hang around their houses in their pajamas.

The front door has become mostly ceremonial, it’s true. But that ceremony is important, no matter how diminished the frequency of use is. The home is a manifestation of the highest form of human cooperation, the family, and it deserves to have a way for visitors to the home to approach it, and its occupants, properly. The front door is the star on the map that says: “You are here.” It’s good manners to display one, even to the people who never ring your doorbell. It is a visual as well as practical detail.

B. There’s a kind of infantile logic afoot in the world that’s as old as the Apple. The fruit in the garden, not the computer. It consists of mistaking correlation for causation, or makes a puerile observation about a minor detail and claims it proves or disproves the whole thing. And the argument, such as it is, is followed up with a “talk to the hand” gesture. Case closed, because I said so.

Well, the lament you hear, followed by “talk to the hand,” is that the house is for the occupants, and the occupants enter through the garage, so snout houses are fine, and did I mention talk to the hand earlier?

You haven’t entered the house yet. You’re still in the garage.

So the whole house of logical cards is built on sand, to mix the metaphor. What’s missing is the realization that the snout house occupants enter it every day like burglars, or hired help.

The garage is grim inside. You get home from work, and the first thing you see is the weedwacker, and the trash you forgot to place on the curb yesterday, but now you can’t see it any more because the door closer light winks off, and you’re fumbling with your keys, and you dropped your briefcase on your toe, and Ow! I cracked my shin on my kid’s broken bike that we can’t hang on the hooks we got for it because I ran it over in the darkened garage yesterday, and the frame is bent.

Elegant huh? This is the real “truth” in the snout house entry. And in a Northern clime, you’re freezing your patoot the whole time you’re fumbling with those belongings.

And when you finally get inside, what do you get? You’re in a grim hallway, no sense of entry, a utility area most likely, piles of laundry, the coats and bookbags your kids shrugged off right on the floor. No wonder you head for the liquor cabinet first.

C. Let’s reshuffle the deck, and get a better hand.

If at all possible, the home needs three entries, if you ask me. Since you read this far, I assume you’re asking me, anyway: Formal, Casual, Utility. The garage door is the utility one, in my little world, by the way.

Put the garage to the side, or in the back, or attached to the house with a passageway. A driveway to a garage behind the house, with a port cochere roof over a side entry is nice. Your children can play in the driveway when they need a hard surface, instead of the street. You can have a roof over you head if you’re unloading groceries and such into the house. The side entry can be the defacto, casual, everyday entry for the occupants, and you can trail your hands along the tall phlox or whatever you have along the short path to the house from the garage. Ah, that’s better.

Have this side entry be a decompression chamber from outside, the outside which is the decompression chamber from the garage, with a place both inside and out to place a parcel for a moment, while you’re in out of the weather. The coat closet is just inside here, of course, but it’s not grim spot, it has a little bench to sit on, and a window that shows late evening sun, if you’ve got it, and it welcomes you home like part of the family, not a scullery maid or dustman. If the weather’s really beastly for a good part of the year where you live, the decompression from travel and the exiting the vehicle to the house can be accomplished entirely enclosed or under cover, of course. But you can do it.

The front, ceremonial door, the one you take your kid’s pictures in front of in their Easter dresses and suits, the one you invite your colleagues from work to approach when they come over for a Christmas fete, the one the paperboy approaches when he’s “collecting” if they still do that, the one the trick-or-treaters can see to approach, is there to show the world that even though your house wears sneakers most days, you have wing tips in the closet, as it were. Or Prada pumps, or whatever.
Tomorrow:
Beware Home Depot

The Open Plan

Hi.

We shall not wax poetic today. I trust this will not make you wax wroth.

Let’s talk about the home. Um, your home. Er, my home. Ah, you know, homes.
Man that’s a lot of ground to cover. Is there any advice I can give you about Homes, that’s applicable to all of them, or at least many of them? I think so. We’ll endeavor to leave local idiosyncrasies out of it, and stick to general themes that have served me and my clients well over the years.

1.Beware the open plan.
Look, I’m not telling you not to go to the zoo, but I am warning you against sticking your fingers into the cages without reading the signs first. The open plan has become the industry standard for housing layout in America. Every home improvement show for years had some avuncular host in a newly plastered room, waving his arms like Mussolini at the balcony and talking about “the space.” Ah yes, ” the space.”

Now, I went to Architecture school in the seventies, and Bruno Zevi and his text, Architecture as Space was the default design text. I learned all about it. I got an “A.” Aren’t I swell?

Well, I took my “A,” and then burned that book, and discarded all that hooey. The kind of affectation that it takes to say you’re in a space, instead of a room, or a series of rooms, is beyond my meager ego. And every time I hear someone say it, I smirk, because I know I’m gong to hear something trite and silly in a moment, about “the space.”

Worrying about “the space” is what designers who are amusing themselves and making an unlivable house are busy doing instead of their jobs. Which is to say, they’re not thinking of the occupants of the house, and their comfort, but are looking to impress, to be heroic. Well, you can’t live in the Arc de Triomphe, and you can’t live in a space. You live in a series of rooms, which are defined in a myriad of ways, sometimes only as suggestions, sometimes as partitions, but always giving the occupants and their guests the visual and tactile clues they require to be comfortable in a home.

The open plan became an absolute good to the space crowd, and I’ve been in really enormous houses, tens of thousands of square feet, no expense spared, and the only difference between them and a two bedroom ranch with an open plan is that one is a bowling alley, and the other is a dirigible hangar. The effect is similar, though; the poor humans rattle around in there like pinballs, and never get privacy, intimate acoustic qualities, segregation of activity, or even the simple thrill of slamming a door on your antagonist in an argument.

The open plan was designed to accommodate post war America’s very small house for the masses. Everybody needed a house, right now, and big Victorians and Colonial Revivals were out of the question. They had to be built right away, fit on small lots, and be affordable. So wise designers integrated several rooms together, to make the whole seem like more than the sum of the parts. They avoided claustrophobia by increasing sightlines in houses that were sometimes only 32 feet long. Well, I’ve been in many houses with open plans recently that have single rooms over twice that long. Linking them together willy-nilly is madness. It’s not claustrophobia that’s the problem anymore, it’s agoraphobia.

The ultimate manifestation of this trend is the vaulted family room. The kitchen, dining, casual dining, and family room is all ganged together, and the family room has a trussed peaked ceiling, or worse, a plastered vaulted ceiling. Everybody sees that and thinks: how capacious, how luxurious, how easy it will be to accommodate my brood in that big space.

Then they try to live in it. The family room is the media shrine. You can fit some big couches in there, no doubt, and a big screen, and the cook isn’t isolated in a kitchen alone, away from the family any longer. But the acoustics are AWFUL. The sound bounces around in there, and the dialog in movies, already mad indistinct with music and THX, is indecipherable because of the echo. So the volume goes up, and everyone in that home has to hear it, at flight deck volume, and the phone call becomes a plea to TURN THAT THING DOWN! What? What did you say? Bruce Willis just blew something up, and I didn’t catch that.

Even simple conversation is difficult, and you grow weary of your voice clanging off that far away ceiling and making you shout, when a whisper should do.

And that open plan maybe doesn’t seem so swell, when you’ve got several teenagers, and maybe a toddler too, and the zoo of noises makes everyone miserable, and makes every connected room into one big rumpus room.

Imagine this. The kitchen’s really big, and has a table right in it, that can hold your family and the food, hot from the oven. Your children can do their homework under your watchful eye there too. The kids finished with their homework are watching the screen in room adjacent, a room with a lower, cozier ceiling height, and enclosed enough to allow some privacy. How about a big arched opening, with glass doors that can be closed to keep the sound in, and allow the studious cohort to concentrate, and the entertainment crew to avoid hearing the sink running, and the appliances, and so forth.

The parent can still see in there, through the glass, and know when to go in and say Knock It Off, as required. Add a niche somewhere, close at hand, with a table top for the phone, and perhaps a laptop, and the phone. There’s room to sit, just a perch if need be, where you can talk a bit, and lean into an enclosed area, and hear, and concentrate, and not shout. There’s a passage to the outside nearby, with a place to put your “going out” belongings and gear, but the slamming door and the blast of winter air, if you’ve got that, doesn’t chill the occupants and distract.

If there’s a stairs for access to the second floor, it’s nowhere near the seating areas, it’s enclosed in its own room, to keep the noise down, and the endless draft that rolls down it away from the seating area. And you won’t have to hear the refrigerator hum all night even when you’re uptairs, or the disconcerting plop of the icemaker turning over. The dishwasher churn and the clink of plates and so forth can be banished from the sleeping areas if you can close a door on it. And heaven help you if you have a pet and you want to keep them out of somewhere in an open plan, and don’t own a cattle prod.

Well, you already spent those hundreds of thousands of dollars building the medieval hall for your common rooms, and housing doesn’t allow many of us to tear it down and start over again. You can tinker, but you there’s no do-over. The bones have to be good, or you’ll never get the flesh on them properly. All you can do is suffer along with it, or move, and sell your house to the next guy.

You can listen to the realtor bring them in, wave their arms around in the cavern you tried to live in, and say ” Just look at this space.”

Try not to smirk.

Tomorrow:
Who needs a front door?

Content to Be Alive

Word.

We had quite a weather evening last night. It’s been warm and dry for, well, since I wrote complaining that it was cold and wet, which is a long time ago. I blame myself.

The lawn crunches underfoot like shredded wheat. The flowers bloom profusely, as long as you water them daily, but woe be to you who forget for a day. If you are a member of the local constabulary, why no, that last sentence is fiction, we only water for an hour in the morning on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, being on the “odd” side of the street, and never on Sunday.

Anyway, nature always solves everything, one way or the other. And last night, she “brought it,” as they say in baseball. Rolling peals of thunder announced the change in the weather, accompanied by almost continuous flashes of lightning, for hours late last night. The power winked out last night around eleven, and so we returned to the America of our farmer forebears, and retired because it was dark.

A delightful puff of air came in the window, cool and ionized, and then the rain came, hissing and popping on the sill. You could almost hear the earth outside sigh, and drink, and smack its lips.
The children sleep right through it, every time, and you wonder when the last time you slept like that was. Twenty years ago? They don’t owe anybody any money. So they sleep. And on top of any cares they might have, unlike their parents, they’re not worried that their children might be woken by the thunder and be frightened. And so the thing that doesn’t affect them affects their parents because it might affect them.

And so you are awake, when you’d rather not be, and you are slightly on edge from the booms, but the rain patters on the shingles, and the paradiddles and flamadiddles begin to lull, and the gentle sigh of your mate gulls you, and you drowse and dream, and start a little when the lightning strikes a little closer, and return to your reverie when it passes for a time, and are content to be alive.

Content to be alive sounds almost mystical, and I’m sorry for that, but I don’t know how else so say it. Peace of mind? I’m not selling insurance, that’s furniture one page over. Happiness? Happiness is a memory. You never know happiness while it’s going on, you only recognize it in hindsight. You mistake thrills for happiness, until the tilt a whirl makes you see your lunch a second time, and you realize your error.

That little sigh of the mother of your children, still nervous when it thunders, some dim childish thought she carries forever, as she drifts off to sleep because you are with her, the whisper of your two sons breathing and snoring down the hall, dreaming dreams of childish intensity and amusement, the languid patter of the warm summer rain on the roof that shelters you all, and the puff of cool air through the window. The house, like all houses, ticks and creaks and hums and pops ever so slightly, as the unfamiliar moisture permeates its very bones. But the sounds are all faint and familiar, like a wordless lullaby.

You never remember falling asleep. It steals up on you, when you’re finally content to be alive.

MoMo

What’s up?

In an obvious attempt to lose half my readership, I write today about cats.
It doesn’t matter what I write. If I write that I like them, the dog people … (crickets)

See, they’re gone already, they didn’t even stick around to see if I was going to link to the haha funny home video of the cat grabbing at a string on a ceiling fan and going helicoptering around for a spell before being hurled into the sliding glass door. But they’ve all already seen it ten times, and e-mailed it to their friends, they know if you’re not in on it already, you’re not in on it at all. You are an apostate. You like those cats.

Yes, yes I do. When I was growing up, I wanted a dog. My dear mother was petrified of animals, and disliked untidiness, so no go. And your parents know you better than you know yourself, after all, and knew I couldn’t care for such a beast. Not for more than a week. Now, the information available about dogs is very sketchy, too patchy for me to make a valid assessment really, but I gather the creatures live longer than a week. No dog for you.

No cats either, a creature that gave poor mom the willies more than a dog, even. At least a dog, well, how do I put this? The dog goes outside. Any Venusian who visited our planet would know who’s in charge around here immediately, by observing which one craps in a box, and which one empties it.

And so as a child, we had a succession of wildlife that taught you nothing about the wild, or about loyalty, or about ferocity, or greed or want, or anything else. Goldfish, gerbils, that sort of thing. For a while, we had little turtles in a dish. You can tell you’re through with them when they turn white, by the way.

And so my mother was right of course. I’ve killed more fauna than a hunter gatherer tribe. But the desire is not a slave to the intellect. I needed another mammal around the house, one that wouldn’t do anything I’d tell it to, and the best I could hope for is predicting its behavior a little. No I’m not referring to my wife, although the description is an apt one. Cats.

Cats are the pet for you, if you must have a pet, but don’t deserve one. They are what all housepets are, animated furniture. They become part of the fabric of your lives, no question, and fray all the fabric in your life, it’s true, but they’re in the background, and don’t bother. Feed them in a desultory fashion, and every twenty five days or so, they’ll deign to sit in your lap and go prrrrrrrrrr. I’m up for that.

My friends have dogs. They never go anywhere, or do anything, without first thinking of how this will affect their creature. They’re better people than us, it takes so much tenacity of will to sign up for that kind of responsibility, to be trusted so supremely with the wellbeing and care of another being. One that will never grow up and mow the lawn for you, I mean.

Get up one half hour late one morning, and go to the door to let the cat in, and he’ll be gnawing the head off a rodent outside the door, and look up at you and you’ll know what he’s thinking: “I had to do this myself, you big stiff; and I’m going to throw up parts of this on your couch later, that’ll learn you to sleep in.”

And so I like the solitary nature of the cat, and its mystery, and the fact that the minute he goes outside, he reverts to his feral self, and the only difference between the little beast and a tiger is its size, and the pink collar he’s wearing. He’ll shred my wife’s clothes for saddling him with that, I bet. Ruins his feral vibe with the woodland creatures.

Two cat is best, three cats is madness, four or more and you’re a newspaper article. We got two black cats at the animal rescue place, to replace the two beloved animals we buried in our yard after living at our new house for a short while.

Of course they were dead before we buried them, what are you, dog people? Anyway, they had lived a long and happy life, and dreamed every night by the fire of mice with lead shoes, and passed away old.

The Big One was just a little lad then, and we asked him to name the new ones. Moonshine and Sunshine he said. I laid some groundwork for editing by pointing out that they were both identically black, and neither was likely to answer to “Sunshine.” He liked “Lady Godiva,” for the chocolate color, not the streaking incident, and so it was Moonshine and Lady Go.
Two black cats. Bad luck perhaps. Moonshine was headstrong and roamed far afield, and I found her after a short spell by the road, where curiosity… well, you get the picture, and I buried her in the woods next to the others. Tears were shed. Lady Go was sad, if cats can be sad.

My wife loved that animal. She is kind to all things great and small, and raises we three male beasts in addition to the cat. Pets are tests of your kindness and reliability, and Moonshine tested our hearts.

He appeared out of the woods that surround our house not long after, skinny, sickly, disheveled, wild. White with gray and black, mottled. He’d pace around the perimeter of the lawn like a panther, lean, hungry, feral. My wife considered it a sign, so soon after Moonshine’s demise, and she fed that beast. She’d put out food at night, though I told her it was crazy; raccoons and possums and foxes and god knows what else would show up each night looking for the buffet. No matter, HE might get some of it, and that was enough for her. Occasionally we’d see him, closer now, but you couldn’t approach him or he’d disappear for days.

My boy remarked the patch of grey atop his head made him look like he had a page boy haircut, although he didn’t know to call it that, he just said: He looks like Moe!

So Momo it was.

My wife is kind, and animals know “kind” when they see it. But a cat is cautious, oh yes. After nine month of patience and caution, he allowed her to touch him once, while he ate greedily from the bowl, still nowhere near the house. Just like me, he was finished.

Soon he was eating on the back step, and sleeping on a pile of straw left over from a Hallowe’en display, at the corner of the house. And then one day, when a year had passed, she put the food in the back hallway, and left the door open.. He came in over a period of ten minutes, still terrified, but curious. She closed the door behind him. And he went CRAZY.

He made that traverse of 38 feet from end to end of the house over and over, launching himself at the windows in the doors, crashing to the floor, and racing to the opposite end for another leap and collision. My wife and little boy scurried around shrieking and trying to reach the doors to open them before he got there, but he was everywhere, and frantic, and they were trapped in the house with a wild beast. They finally got one open, and he was gone.

As my wife recounted the tale to me when I arrived home from work, I had to stifle a smile. She thought she had blundered, and he was gone forever. She doesn’t know men very well, I thought to myself. Though all she gets all day is we three men, men, men. She had become the sun around which that little creature orbited, as had we all, and sure enough the next day he was back.

And shortly thereafter, he was sleeping by the fire, and making that prrrrr noise, a little peeved about THAT UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT AT THE VETERINARIAN, but exhibiting to this day the only attitude that cat owners generally envy their dog friends: Gratitude.