Study in Perfect (2 page)

Two pencil-scratched growth charts on a closet door documented our daughters' progress up and out of the house. At five foot seven and five foot three, they were gone, living in tiny houses of their own in a blue-collar area of town with train tracks and a funky grocery store.

We took a deep breath and looked around.

All around us in our visual field is a world we understand and simultaneously take for granted. We assume that trees remain as they are … rooted in the ground. Intuitively, we understand that water seeks the low point and then seeks its level. These are subconscious phenomena that we live with every day. Most of the time I don't even like to think of what I do as “design”—as it conjures in the mind something graphic or sculptural or high-tech. I think of my process as making conceptual connections. In this case, finding things we recognize and bringing them forward, or raising them up into our field of vision.

—MICHAEL BARRY, ARCHITECT

What do you do when your house turns against you? When maintenance of the body occupies an hour of each day, with brushes and paste and tweezers and emery boards? There's the little click inside your shoulder when you do your sit-ups, and the floor responds when you lie back against it. You know the spot, where the joinery rubs and the nail squeaks.

With the children gone, we expected a sudden influx of oxygen, a second honeymoon, this one lasting a couple of decades. But the press of middle age was upon us. My father-in-law suffered
a stroke, triple bypass, lung cancer, and finally died, a thin contrail of the FBI strongman he once was. The girls entered their bumpy twenties with minimum-wage jobs, romances, un-sympathetic landlords—a long way yet from self-sufficiency. Indeed, with larger pressures from both younger and older generations, we felt vacuum packed. The once brand-new renovation at 1637 Rosewood, too, was not just twenty years older; it had landed in that unfashionable place between antique and contemporary, retro and old fashioned, like waist-high underpants or an AMC Gremlin or a middle-aged man who refuses to give up smoking dope.

A house is a body. Just look at the argot: dental molding, eyebrow window, face board, face brick, footer, footing, head, knee walls, nosing, shakes, sleeper, toenail. Thus, a leak in the roof is unsettling because it's like torn skin, a scorched chimney like a dirty neck. Sometimes you can waylay disgust by choosing what to see and what not to see. Don't look in the mirror. Throw away that bathroom scale. Or develop immunity, called “growing used to.”

One day I let my guard down. It was midwinter. Without the healthy distraction of sunlight, I was more than a little depressed. I opened our back gate, which sat on an alley lined with trash bins and recycling containers. Next to our silver maple a half-full beer bottle, left by a homeless man who made a recessed area behind our fence his bedroom. Then, to my dismay—a spray of aqua-colored safety glass, sour cream containers, and a dozen soggy French fries, like the debris of last night's raucous party. I began to sweep in a cloud of gray dust and glass shards, pushing the mess farther into the alley, where
it became the city's responsibility. My sneakers were coated with grit, as I knew my lungs were. For eighteen years, we had passed this kind of scene without seeing it.

The second thought was simply—how best to do this? The lot, as it was, being very narrow and deep, provided the answer. So long as one follows one's own line of consciousness (analytical and intuitive) about sense of place, I believe one will always find the answer.

—MICHAEL BARRY

To cheer ourselves up, we bought a shiny red Vespa, and when that was stolen, replaced it with a silver one. We buzzed down to the coffee shop, took long loops through Olmsted's Cherokee Park, unembarrassed though we knew we resembled Mama and Papa bears on a tricycle. We rode farther out of town to a scenic byway known as River Road. The air pummeled our faces; we sailed through walls of scent—sweet, damp, pine, or possum decaying. To the left, the swollen river and a barge pushing by. To the right, a lone real estate sign marked “Exquisite!” in bright yellow. A long gravel driveway extended back from the road between crumbling posts. We said
why not, let's look, we can't, oh come on, useless, no one's around, couldn't hurt, why not, OK.

For over two centuries, Kentucky has offered up more than its share of vices, featuring a wicked blend of liquor, tobacco, and horse betting. The state produces almost all the world's bourbon and 37 percent of U.S. horse sales. Just minutes outside Louisville, the landscape dips and gently rises and horse fences
painted rich brown follow suit; the animals graze in fields or bunch together under a tree, tails swatting flies. Alongside bluegrass, acres of burley tobacco flutter and the barns where the crop is air-cured rise in regular intervals. These are beautiful structures, with silvery tin roofs and charcoal-blue siding. Often the fencing is whitewashed, and in sunlight or gloom the palette is always startling and elegant. Tobacco barns inspired architect Michael Barry, who took on the task of renovating and expanding a dowdy seventies house off River Road. Its siding is now the same blue-black, the roof metallic bright, and the doors are framed in a warm, orange-tinged oak the color of dried tobacco.

We slid off the scooter, treading carefully, as if trespassing in more ways than one: the property belonged to someone else; it was likely way beyond our means, though a number of modest homes lined River Road; and finally, we had no business considering a move with one child still in college. From the front, the place was modest, a cross between a Cape Cod and a windowed barn, with garage and second-floor guest room connecting at a forty-five-degree angle. We stole around to the backyard, a large expanse of grass dropping to a creek and woods beyond. Turning around, we faced the house the way it was meant to be seen, panoramically: angled roofline to the left, a vast stretch of windows and two sets of double glass doors across the middle, punctuated by a pagodalike porch with white crossbeams and five, count them,
five
huge decks extending into the grass like a great stair. “Oh, my God,” we said. We peered through the windows into the great room, where blond hardwood extended more than forty feet west, disappearing right and left into channels formed by half-walls and frosted glass. We could see a sleek
cement and steel fireplace, its mantle raw cherry, the firebox set slightly off center, and could it be, there was an outdoor shower too! To call the plan “open” was an understatement; but somehow, the house was both spacious and deeply human in scale. We backed off with an “oh well,” confident the price would be over a million. Heading out of the driveway, we grabbed the info sheet, which announced in bold, “You'll feel like you're on vacation!” Underneath, an asking price of less than a third of our expectation. “We could do this,” we whispered simultaneously, then called our realtor, the listing agent, and both of our daughters, who all drove out to meet us. Four hours later, our bid was accepted.

As one stands in the grain of the site, facing its depth of field, one also stands in the grain of the dwelling. As few doors as possible, consciously eroded parallel walls, a kind of “sheared space,” with beams extending from inside to outside—all reinforce this “in-the-grain” attitude.

—MICHAEL BARRY

Our old house had many doors—twenty-five to be exact. Pocket, closet, French, doors marked “DO NOT ENTER” covered with hex signs and skateboard logos. Behind them, the girls entered puberty, tried their first cigarettes and beer, my husband and I had covert sex and hasty arguments. We all had our secrets and, in theory, we were safe. The house was rocked by all kinds of weather, but the weather that affected us most was interior.

The new house has only
two
inside doors, both leading to lavatories. The first-floor master bedroom flows around a partition into the great room. The great room veers into the master
bath, sink, and shower. The kitchen pours into the great room. Large open “windows” front the guest bedroom, though there is no glass, only space, and a discrete stairway rises from the foyer.

We could bowl in this place, or contra dance with a dozen couples. We could throw a wedding, or hold an auction, or hire a Big Band orchestra. We could run laps, ice skate, shot-put; the possibilities were endless. We stretched out on the taut, bare floor and let the dogs flop and sniff.

No whining or squeaking or inch-long splinters; no creases, dents, or sun damage; no history at all. The house gave us a new skin and permission to explore it. The house was young, unembarrassed in its nudity, and so were we. This was
horizontal
living, our past and future laid out at once, in the open, where we could see it. Which doesn't mean we were untouched by difficulty; we just had the sudden oxygen and range to consider it all.

I grew up with a deep respect for all things antique, objects that survived fashion, sturdy enough to last hundreds of years. My grandmother gifted me a set of flow-blue dishes from the 1800s, a French writing desk from the 1700s, nine miniature portraits with piano-key frames. I tried to avoid stores like IKEA selling trendy furniture that would most likely be dust in a decade. We were both raised on the East Coast and our furniture fit well in the Rosewood place with its early 1900s atmosphere of compressed history and withheld energy. Shaker chairs with sagging cane seats, rabbit holes inside a cupboard—these objects contained centuries.

In the new house, so tuned to the sprawling Kentucky landscape, they looked fussy and stubborn—in short, ridiculous. We used the fireplace as an anchor, threw down a small rug, shuffled
the couch, captain's chairs, and recliners around it. Seating for six, theoretically. But in a forty-foot great room, the rug felt like a raft, chairs and couch legs hanging on like shipwreck survivors. The floorboards established an east/west current, better left unimpeded—no dams or backsplashes. Without banisters, balustrades, carpeting, doors, partitions, or skid tape to keep from slipping, we slipped. The dogs spun around corners, back legs flying. At first we were disoriented, confused. How to settle, where to step first? Should we bother with furniture at all or just throw down a few sleeping bags?

For more than fifty years, every step we've taken has been shadowed by 78 million fellow baby boomers. We were born in a crowd, schooled, worked, married, divorced, remarried, had 1.86 children. Now little explosions are going off everywhere as boomers empty their kids' bedrooms, enjoy a little free time, and maybe even some discretionary income. You can track our interests by watching the Food Network or HGTV or a flock of tourists visiting vineyards. On a whim, my friends Leslie and Bill purchased land in Costa Rica and plan to spend half the year there. Stephen divorced, remarried an intelligent, gorgeous woman and finds himself a father again at fifty-five. His last email, written in a sleepless fog, announced they were calling the child Elvis. We'll retire in a crowd and die in a crowd. When we get to that point, there'll be a national ad campaign for ashes shot into space or your DNA mapped and published. It'll happen. We're already seeing “green” cemeteries, where biodegradable caskets or burial shrouds of natural fibers are used, and graves are placed randomly throughout a woodland or meadow, marked with the planting of a tree or shrub.