A Place of My Own (5 page)

Of course I knew something about gardening. And while it seems to me building has some striking things in common with gardening—both are ways of giving shape to a landscape; of joining elements of nature and culture to make things of usefulness and beauty; of, in effect, teasing meaning from a tree—the intellectual and physical abilities each discipline calls for could scarcely be more different. In the garden a casual approach to geometry, a penchant for improvisation, and a preference for trial and error over the following of directions will rarely get you into serious trouble. Building a house is another story. It seemed to me that the difference between gardening and building was a little like the difference between cooking (which I like to do) and baking (which I can’t), a difference that has everything to do with one’s attitude toward recipes. Mine has always been cavalier.

Yet after a while the sheer improbability of building something myself became the most important reason for attempting it. Just because I hadn’t come by the necessary skills or habits of mind naturally (and certainly not genetically) didn’t mean I couldn’t cultivate them. During the renovation of our house I’d spent enough time observing the intricate discipline of the architect and wondering at the carpenter’s fluency with the things of this world to have acquired an admiration for these alien habits of mind, and over time my admiration blossomed into envy. Watching the carpenters patiently translate Charlie’s sheaf of abstractions into the reality of a habitable and meaningful room, I realized that what I beheld was the very foil of my own impatient and disorderly brain.

Straight and plumb, square and level, right and true: To someone like me, who can always see at least two sides of every issue, who spends his days in the company of words he dearly loves but knows better than to trust, these concepts glistened in the light of an obsolete but still longed-for certainty. Staunch, dependable, beyond the reach of argument, they were qualities you could actually build a house with. I envied all that: the deliberate, first-this-then-that of architecture, the old reliable syntax of carpentry, the raising of nonmetaphorical structures on the nonmetaphorical ground.

Writers sometimes like to draw glib parallels between building and writing, but it seemed to me nothing could be farther from the truth. Did the writer inhabit a world where “true” and “right” were things you could ascertain, where abstractions stood or fell of their own weight, where the existence of something didn’t depend on a consensus? At the end of his day the builder alone could say—and yet didn’t need to say, because
there it was—
he had added something to the stock of incontestable reality, created a new fact. It sounded too good to be true. This might not be a universe where I’d feel even remotely at home, but it was one that I resolved to visit, in the hope of finding something I needed to know.

I was in no hurry to tell anyone about the do-it-myself part of my plan, fully expecting a cold shower of skepticism, if not outright ridicule. Judith especially, who was already armed with many excellent reasons to be dubious about the project, had to be approached carefully. As she pointed out the first time I broached the idea to her, over dinner one evening, she’d never once seen me try to repair a broken chair, let alone build anything from scratch. But I was ready for this, and the notion that I was proposing to build the thing myself
precisely because
I was so ill-equipped to do so proved to be a deft rhetorical stroke, a jujitsu move that effectively disarmed her skepticism by embracing it. By the end of the conversation Judith could fairly be described as supportive, though she strongly, and as it turned out wisely, urged that I look for someone who could help me—someone, as she put it, “who at least has a clue.”

When I finally decided to call Charlie, we’d been living in the house he’d designed for nine months, and already the place fit us like a set of familiar clothes. We were almost whole again financially, and the bruises of the construction process had all but healed. For now, I was working in the loft of the barn where Judith paints, and that was tolerable—as long as I didn’t mind the turpentine fumes rising from her palette in winter, the atticlike heat that collected up there in summer, and the yammering drizzle of her talk radio all year long. Painters and writers clearly use different sides of the brain when working, which makes sharing a sound system, if not a space, virtually impossible. The barn loft was a room to work in, but it certainly wasn’t a room of my own.

Since moving back into the house, I’d gotten into the habit of dressing in front of the bedroom window, a fine vantage from which to assess the daily progress of the seasons, the weather, the garden. This is the window where I’d stood with Charlie a year before, and every morning I’d find myself drawn to the same spot, daydreaming my way down the garden path, a shirt button at a time, in the general direction of that notion of his, which by now seemed very much my own. I still wasn’t picturing anything terribly specific, not yet. But no longer nothing, either.

And so on one of those mornings, in the spring before the summer that brought Isaac, I called Charlie first thing to tell him my plan. I told him that not only did I want to go ahead with the building we’d discussed, but that I was thinking of building it myself. I expected a protest, and probably would have backed right off had I detected any sign of one. But Charlie didn’t even inhale hard. He acted as if my being a builder were the most natural thing in the world. Which was daunting.

I told him that, much as I appreciated his offer of a free design, I intended to pay him for it. But he needed to understand that whatever plan he came up with, it had to be simple enough for someone like me to build.

“You mean idiot-proof,” Charlie said; he hadn’t asked.

“I won’t take that personally.”

I launched into a rambling monologue about the little temple I envisioned. “It could be like a…with a desk looking out on…and we can’t forget to…”—this long flight of long-pent words straining to capture this still dreamy room of my own. Charlie let me go on like this for a while. And then he broke in to ask a perfectly straightforward question to which I had no answer.

“So where do you want to put this building?”

Aside from someplace in the landscape framed by that window, I had no idea. Much as I’d been daydreaming about the building, I’d neglected to settle on a spot for it. I hadn’t even ventured out those three hundred feet to walk the land yet, at least not on foot. I realized I’d flunked my first test in Concrete Reality.

“Look, there’s no point talking about this or any other building in the abstract,” Charlie explained, “because the site is going to dictate so much about it. This thing is one kind of guy if we perch him on the edge of the meadow looking back toward the house, and something completely different if he’s sitting off in the woods all by himself. So that’s the first thing you need to do…”

Charlie was trying, gently, to bring me and my daydreamy notion down to the ground.

First this, then that
.

The time had come for me to site my building, to fix this dream of mine to the earth.

Settling on the site of a new building is a momentous act, at least if you stop to think about it. That not everybody does is obvious from all those buildings that crouch like strangers on their own land, looking out of place or simply oblivious. Yet it may be that you can think
too much
about site selection. Because deciding on the right place to build is also uncannily simple, a process in which the advice of the senses and intuition is often your most reliable guide. I of course came to this realization very late, and only by the most roundabout path.

The momentousness of the decision was
all
I could think about. Wherever I put my building, it would stay, more or less forever. I’d have to live with the consequences of the choice as long as I was around, and others would be stuck with it after that. Charlie had said that key elements of my building’s design, its scale and skin and fenestration, the way it met the ground and the pitch of its roof, would be determined by this first fact. Then there were the views to consider (from the building, and of the building), the fall of light across its floor, the movement of air around it, the ambient sounds, the angle at which it met the late-day sun. Dwell too long on so many soon-to-be-set-in-stone characteristics and the decision is liable to paralyze you. I know, I am only talking about a hut, an outbuilding. Yet I felt that by choosing its site—a single place out of all possible places in which to build—I was setting this great big contingency in motion, rolling it down the steep, one-way hill of personal and local history.

Faced with any such large decision, my first instinct (if you can call it that) is to look for a book to tell me what to do. But I was surprised to find that the literature of architecture and building contains remarkably little on the subject. Lewis Mumford had complained back in the fifties that the proper siting of houses was a lost art, and I turned up little to suggest it has since been found.

Mumford pointed me all the way back to Vitruvius, whose famous treatise on architecture, written in the first century
B.C.
, offers some sensible advice on the siting of cities, dwelling houses, and tombs, all of which, he maintained, should be located according to the same principles. Vitruvius advises the prospective builder to seek a spot that is neither too high (where exposure to wind is a problem) nor too low (where it may be subject to the “poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes”). He cautioned that a site can be intrinsically unhealthy and recommended that the builder slaughter an animal that had grazed on it and examine its liver for signs of disease. But nothing deserved closer consideration than a building site’s position with respect to the sun, and Vitruvius spelled out principles of orientation that have not been improved on (which is not to say they have always been heeded): Buildings should be laid out on an east-west axis, with their principle exposure to the south. This means that in the Northern Hemisphere the low angle of the sun in winter will keep the building warm, while during the summer, when the sun passes overhead, direct sunlight will enter only in the morning and evening, when it will be welcome. For the same reason, he recommended an eastern exposure for bedrooms, western for dining rooms.

Remarkably, American architecture had to rediscover these simple rules in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargoes suddenly made heating oil precious. For a long time before that, our houses had been plunked down pretty much anywhere a developer’s lot-lines dictated. According to Mumford, Americans have never been particularly sensitive to site, a fact he attributes partly to cheap energy and partly to the eighteenth-century scheme, promoted by Thomas Jefferson, to impose a great Cartesian grid over most of the nation’s land, with no regard for topography, drainage, or grading, let alone aesthetics or convenience. This division of the country into equal, square parcels of land may have made for easy surveying and speculation, but it discouraged the sensitive siting of buildings.

Of course there is more to choosing a site than orientation to the sun. For example, what sort of topography was I looking for? How should the new building relate to the house? How do you go about judging the relative hospitality of a patch of ground? What exactly was my place in this particular landscape? As far as I could tell, the Chinese had been the only culture to devise a systematic method of site selection. But fêng shui sounded very arcane to me, if not kooky, and for a long time I avoided reading anything about it. I eventually found myself turning to the garden designers, who seemed, at least in the West, to have thought more about how architecture should fit into the landscape than the architects had.

The most pertinent advice I found was in the garden literature of the eighteenth century in England, when for a brief moment, some of the best minds of the culture, from Alexander Pope to Horace Walpole to Joseph Addison, turned their attention to landscape design. These writers had thought long and hard about exactly what constituted a “pleasing prospect,” as well as about the aesthetic and psychological experience of landscape, and since the picturesque gardens they promoted made abundant use of small outbuildings, which they called
follies—
a word I strove to keep as far from discussions of my project as possible—there seemed to be a lot that applied.

Since the original impetus for my building had begun with the notion of improving the view from our new bedroom window, the romantic designers—who were among the first people in the West to develop a taste for natural scenery—seemed ideally suited to the project. They worked to make every prospect in their gardens look “natural.” What they meant by this was that a landscape should look not like nature as we commonly find it, and as I had found it outside my window, but as it appears in landscape paintings—“works of Nature [being] most pleasant,” Addison wrote, “the more they resemble those of art.” In the landscape paintings the Romantics revered, nature tends to be well-composed (divided into foreground, middle ground, and background) and pleasingly varied (particularly in terms of light and dark). It also offers the spectator’s eye an inviting path to follow from one element to another, but especially from the foreground to the distant horizon.

Without being conscious of it, the dissatisfaction Judith and I had felt with the new view from our bedroom window probably owed something to our picturesque expectations, which most of us acquire growing up in this culture. All the elements of a pleasing landscape were present—fields and trees and even, now that we’d dug a small pond, water—yet there was something wrong with the picture. It was uninviting. Specifically, the scene offered the eye no reason to travel from the foreground to the background, or any path on which to do so. By adding what the Romantic designers used to call an eye-catcher, we were hoping to tie the little fortress of cultivation down by the house into the broader landscape above.

But exactly where in the picture should my eye-catcher go? My first impulse had been to put the building somewhere along an imaginary line extending out from the main axis of the garden. For many years, this line, after following the fieldstone wall and the perennial border, would pass through the arbor and then lapse into an impassable tangle of boulders and brush. This particular no-man’s-land occupied the space between a pair of fine but inaccessible trees, one a white ash and the other a great, leaning white oak. The situation was somewhat improved after we dug the pond and used the spoils from the excavation to regrade the rocky area between the two trees. Today, the path journeys out to the pond, skirts its north bank, and then climbs what is now a gentle, grassy rise between the ash and the oak before settling in a small, circular meadow drawn around a stunted old swamp maple.

It seemed to me there were a couple of possible building sites along this axis, the most obvious being the bank of the pond. And for a while a pond-house seemed like an appealing idea. I could picture a little shingled shack with a dock out front jutting over the water. Though I eventually discarded this idea (it seemed too cute), it did help me appreciate how a particular site could shape my image of the building. I also rejected the site beneath the oak; the tree branched so high overhead it didn’t look as though it would afford a building much sense of shelter.

But I’d also begun to doubt the wisdom of building right on the main axis of the house and garden, and in this I found strong support among the picturesque designers I consulted. They detested straight lines on aesthetic as well as political grounds—axes being closely associated with “the formal mockery of princely gardens” on the continent—and made sure their paths always curved. A path that eventually relinquished its geometry seemed in keeping with the character of this landscape, which is to grow progressively less tended the further you travel from the house. There was also something a little too obvious about a building that confronted you at the end of such a straight line. Putting it on axis would make it seem closer too, when my goal, I’d begun to realize, was to make these few acres feel more like a world. But if instead I situated the building at an angle to the main axis, and then made the approach to it slightly roundabout, the workings of perspective and psychology would make it appear that much farther away—and make the property seem that much larger.

Now I was approaching the problem as a picturesque designer might, deploying a bit of pictorial illusion to “improve” the landscape and entice the viewer into the scene. I imagined that a Capability Brown or William Kent would have objected to my original plan to site the building in the sun-filled center of the view on the grounds that it would rob the scene of mystery; better to tuck it into a corner of the frame, preferably in a spot where it would be partially obscured in shade. The site should be visible from the house, they would recommend, but only just. The idea is for it merely to catch the eye, to pique the viewer’s curiosity without satisfying it. The location of an eye-catcher should make the viewer want to venture out to the building, there to experience an entirely different sort of mood than the one on offer near the house.

This was no small point, for the picturesque designers were interested in much more than composing pretty pictures. They were concerned with time and movement too, and conceived of their landscapes in three dimensions, striving to make them work as narratives as well as paintings. Follow the path through a picturesque landscape and you will come upon a succession of distinct places, each designed to evoke a different emotion.

I didn’t have anything so fancy in mind, but I did like the idea that the site for my building would offer a different kind of experience than the rest of the property, as well as a new perspective on things. Of course this vastly complicated my site selection. For now I needed not only to find a spot that would add something to the view from the house, but one that would offer its own interesting views, a good place in its own right.

The time had come for me to climb down from my second-floor perch and walk the land. Apart from the turning of pages, I hadn’t yet lifted a finger to bring my building any closer to reality. But thinking picturesquely had taken me some distance, narrowed my search. Now at least I knew the frame in which the site had to fit and where in that frame the site should
not
fall: the too-obvious middle. That still left a lot of ground to cover, however. I called Charlie to see if he had any advice. He did, though at the time it seemed too glib to be of much use. “Think about it this way,” he suggested. “You’ve been hiking all day, it’s getting late, and you’re looking for a good campsite—just a comfortable, safe-feeling place to spend the night. That’s your site.”

“At a certain season of our life,” Thoreau wrote in
Walden
, “we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Now I entered my own such season, though I didn’t manage to approach it quite as lightly as Thoreau. (Of course Thoreau was never serious about settling; I was.) The first time I walked the land was a bright June afternoon, the sun directly overhead, and I quickly lost myself in my perambulations. I traced patterns across the property that would have looked antic had Judith or some neighbor happened to notice me, pacing first this way, then that, doubling and then tripling back again, before stopping to appraise a view, a deliberative process that involved a long, slow pirouette through 360 degrees. The second time out, I brought along a chair, planting it in a succession of auspicious-seeming spots, the better to rehearse inhabiting them and observe the landscape’s constantly changing face.

From out here the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn’t just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that—a point of view. What would be my angle on things when I sat down to work? Some spots where I put my chair implied an oblique angle on the world, while others met it more forthrightly. I could see that I was going to have to decide whether I was a person more at home in the shadows, or out in the sunny middle of things. How important to me was the company of a tree, or the reflection of water? Just how available to the gaze of others—on the road, in the house—did I wish the face of my building to be? Some sites I considered offered what seemed like the geographical correlative of shyness, others self-assertion. It was as though the landscape were asking me to declare myself, to say this place, and not that one, suited me, in some sense
was
me.

And not just for the moment or month or year. (“And there I did live,” Thoreau wrote of the sites he surveyed, “for an hour, a summer and a winter life…”) No, this was for keeps, and there were times when I felt that choosing a site had become a metaphor for every other fateful decision I’d ever had to make, but especially all those ones that went under the decidedly un-Thoreauvian rubric of Settling Down: buying the house, signing the note, getting married, deciding to have the baby, taking the job, giving up the job. (Had Thoreau done
any
of these things?) None of these decisions had come easy, and yet it helped to remind myself that not one of them had ever given me a moment’s regret either. Maybe I’m the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance. As Thoreau pointed out in
Walden
, there’s freedom in deliberation (literally: “from freedom”); once that’s over, though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike. Odd as it sounds, there were moments when I felt as though I was picking out not a building site but a cemetery plot—when I felt
that
sort of bottomless claustrophobia in time.