Study in Perfect Read Free

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.
    The new house opened our eyes to design and, like thousands of others, we surfed the Internet for knockoff Sapien tower bookcases that would put our books within reach but not clutter the landscape of our great room. We shifted a small vase on the mantle until, slightly off center, it looked exactly right. On our backyard deck, we placed five Ronde armchairs, all facing southeast, like seagulls headfirst into the wind. Not coincidentally, our mailbox was stuffed with catalogs from CB 2 and West Elm, and we understood the slick TV ad in which a black-suited woman sits before her condescending architect, pulls a Kohler faucet from her purse, and says, “Design a house around
this
.”

    The door is a missing piece of wall; sometimes a wall is closed and sometimes the wall is open.
    â€”MICHAEL BARRY
    Even where walls were necessary, Michael minimized their effect by cutouts, half-walls, artful absences, and subtle irregularity. A larger symmetry was implied, not doggedly spelled out. Wherever possible, he dispensed with traditional trim. Instead, between sheetrock and frame, he built a half-inch indentation, like an irrigation channel. It adds an elegance and depth to the joinery. It seems more truthful to the juxtaposition of two dissimilar materials, this crevice of shadow and mystery—a mixing space, as well as a little breathing room. We run our fingers inside when turning a corner, like caressing the valleys between knuckles.
    Side by side at the dinner table, my husband and I chew silently, each of us absorbed in a book. We work in separatewings of the house, but this distance can be intimate too. Across the great room, he shouts, “Can you get the phone? Please?” Or: “Do you have a minute? I want to read you something.” Sometimes we have no choice but to listen to each other. Sneezes, snores, sighs, the rattle of keypads, the dog on the couch licking a ripe spot—sound leaves its source, gullies, ambles, spreads. There’s a strange noise somewhere and, like ship radar, we rotate our heads about, trying to locate it.

    In a vertical dwelling, we stand at attention, prepared for battle, whether the conflict simmers in adolescence or the obstinacy of aged