If It's Not A House, It's A Home

9020

Brian James Barr

I like to wake up early in the mornings, not before dawn, but just as she is breaking, and brew a pot of coffee. I like to do this because the coffee pot is located just under the kitchen window, which faces southeast. We are on top of a hill, and from the window I can see the houses and trees of our neighborhood, and above them, the sky. In the Pacific Northwest, morning tends to arrive gently, and the post-war bungalows and shaggy firs are usually shrouded in a thin, maritime fog that casts everything in a moody bluish-gray tone. The sky is a smear of deep indigo and, as morning begins to break, becomes laced with strands of tangerine. From the North, airplanes circle around to land at Boeing Field near the Duwamish in the valley below and I watch them. We are far enough away here that we can see them, but not hear them. They fly lower and lower, silent, until they disappear into the fold of the river valley to land.

Our house is very small. Tucked into an 800 square foot plan we have a good-sized living room, a good-sized kitchen, and a hallway leading to two sufficiently sized bedrooms, one of which M and I fashioned into my writing room. Here, I type in the mornings and afternoons at a sturdy oak desk I bought at World Market, surrounded by shelves full of books, two bushy houseplants, and a piano that belongs to M. If the afternoons are warm enough, I open the windows and listen to the rain or the wind or the sounds of the birds. Our two cats often join me while I work, perching themselves on the squat bookcase below the window facing the backyard. The window is a good vantage point for keeping an eye on the birds that flit about between our massive blue spruce and maple trees and the comparatively younger and smaller fruit trees. We have neighbors on all four sides, but do not see those to the back of us thanks to a thick wall of laurel that serves as the Eastern edge of our property line and the Western edge of theirs. Our backyard is, for the most part, private.

We are the third owners of this house. It was built in 1942 during the wartime housing boom and is one of the oldest houses on our street. While it is architecturally non-descript, we like to call it “a ranch-style home bent into an L-shape”. In typical American, anti-bourgeois fashion, the design valued efficiency over flare. The living room and kitchen make up the East-West half of the L-shape, the bedrooms and bath the North-South half. There is no upstairs or downstairs. No attic or basement. If it belongs to any architectural design category, call it “no bullshit”, or at the very least “the bare essentials”. It is just big enough for M and I and our two cats, which are both the size of small bear cubs and are exceptionally skilled at taking up more room in the house than they need.

It is small, but is not stuffy. Something about the L-shape of the floorplan encourages a free-flowing rhythm from one corner of the house to the opposite corner. Each room has ample natural lighting. Our West-facing living room opens up to the neighborhood via two massive windows. In the evenings we sit and read and wave to the neighbors as they stroll past on the sidewalk. The sun sinks behind the house across the street from us. Many nights, we watch the narrow silhouette of a lone hawk circling in the Western sky. The light is soft in our house and evening arrives often as gently as the morning.

West Seattle, April 2009