All Beautiful Houses Are Alike

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Tolstoy said happy families are all alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He was half right, and about houses, not families. I am not going to write here about those big old houses owned by oil tycoons or presidents and such, nor will I post any photos from thousands of blogs or architecture twitter. This note is more about beautiful houses bought by normal people, just a step above the nicer houses in Lennar subdivisions.

Beautiful houses really are all beautiful in a similar way.

1. Light: Light finds interesting ways to come in at all times.

2. Walls: You can feel the invisible layer on the walls containing real thoughts and human moments someone had to have in order to build them that way. It’s almost as if someone was chasing a moment they felt before and tried to relive it, to varying degrees of success.

3. Architecture bits: The arches, the placement of windows, high ceilings… High ceilings are non-negotiable; there is not a single truly beautiful house with a low ceiling. I don’t care about Frank Lloyd Wright or anyone else you can point out to prove me wrong on this one: low ceilings are ugly and don’t let you think. Once you get a house with high ceilings, you never buy one with low ceilings again, barring bankruptcy or, like, Alzheimer’s.

4. “Luxury”: It’s not the right word, but bear with me. Of course it might mean high-quality wooden counters, it might mean granite countertops, marble this, stone that, but in this case it was a 200+ sq ft courtyard. It makes literally no sense from a cost perspective for anyone to have a courtyard with a fireplace in the middle of their house, and yet they get built, because someone is chasing a feeling they either felt a long time ago or that was etched into their DNA by the grace of God.

5. Design: Unique design that did not come out of a subdivision catalog.

The second half of Tolstoy’s line collapses completely. Ugly houses are not ugly in their own unique ways. Ugly houses are all fucked up in exactly the same way. Dark hallways, same living rooms, same beige, same low ceilings. If you’ve walked through one, you’ve walked through all of them. Ugliness is standardized. Beauty might rhyme, but it has variety in it.

I just sold one of the beautiful ones.

This house was built around a courtyard: an open-air room at the center of the house, with stone columns, an outdoor fireplace, and string lights crossing overhead. There was a limestone tower over the entry, and an arched iron door with a stained-glass insert that could be opened while the door itself stayed closed. If I opened that glass insert, opened the courtyard doors, opened the backyard doors, I could get the breeze flowing all the way through the house in an act of defiance to my Slavic ancestors, constantly afraid of the promaha, the deadly indoor cross-breeze that has allegedly killed more Slavs than both world wars. There was a metal spiral staircase that led up to the library at the top of the limestone tower. Inside the house: high ceilings, plenty of sunlight during the day, plenty of shade in the afternoons. All the ways beautiful houses are alike.

If you’re a normal person (no trust fund, no exit, no millions parked anywhere) and you want a house like this, big and beautiful, tremendous, best there is, you are going outside the city. That’s the math. The land inside the city went to people with more money a long time ago. So out you go to find everything you traded away. Couple of things worth mentioning:

1. Public sewer. Out here it’s septic, and I will never forget septic for the rest of my life after this: not only is there a tank, there’s a drain field, setbacks, soil requirements, the sprinkler timer that stops working, chlorine tablets, all that stuff. Almost half an acre goes to the septic bullshit. You can’t do anything on it except get angry every time you mow it.

2. Neighbors. In my head, moving out came with a certain kind of neighbor. In practice, the people who moved to the middle of nowhere all had their reasons, and some of those reasons are that nobody else would have them. The neighbors are generally weirdos, reliably and disappointingly short of the fantasy I didn’t even realize I was carrying. Like, I thought I’d see parents out building stuff with their kids, swings hanging off the big trees, ball games at dusk, an RV that doesn’t get flat tires from standing in one place for years. I might have met one guy like that, and nine who are not like that. You don’t get interesting people out there: art guy doesn’t move out there, outdoors guy doesn’t either. You get a meh guy slowly getting fat until he balloons over his couple of acres and goes out to greener pastures.

This is a misalignment (and there is gold in them thar hills; I might expand on this in a later post).

The people who got there before you did not want it the way you wanted it. By the time a normal person can afford a truly beautiful house, he will be surrounded by people who don’t appreciate beautiful houses. It’s the same for old rows of Victorian houses in an old neighborhood with one demographic as it is for out-in-the-country Spanish Colonial Revival villas with a completely different one.

All of this is OK. It’s not really a flaw, it’s just the way it is.

Buy a beautiful house.

Let the fantasy die.

Or stay misaligned until time smooths the edges and it all falls into place.