The history of a house -- or, perhaps a state of mind -- or, conceivably, both at once.
My son Edward came to live with me in late 1977. Partly as a result of his full-time presence in the household, in the late 1970s I revised the interior in several ways:
- I had the attic insulated and sheetrocked, did some rewiring, put in a whole-house vent fan and some track lights, and added a full bath in an alcove there. This made it an effective and useful space for Edward to occupy, giving him his own bathroom and a greater degree of privacy for him as well as for me.
- I added a ground-floor half-bath in a corner of the kitchen. This involved closing off one of the entrances from the dining room. The villa now had a toilet on each floor.
- That project required relocating a large cabinet that had occupied the space. This led to a reconsideration of the kitchen, the repositioning of several cabinets, the creation of several new ones, and the resurfacing in a terra-cotta formica of various surfaces there.
- The attic bathroom, the kitchen half-bath, and the various kitchen modifications were achieved with the help of the late Alex Moir, a local architect and contractor who, in his role as civic leader, was largely responsible for the establishment of the Serpentine Art & Nature Commons, a small nature preserve, just a few blocks away.
- Living with us as of 1978 was Barbara Alper, a photojournalist. Her need for a much improved darkroom let to the complete revision of the crude first version of that facility in the basement, rebuilt from the ground up: new plumbing, new wiring, custom-designed cabinetry (including two enlarger stations), a long fiberglas sink constructed with the aid of the photographer Lyle Bongé, proper ventilation -- even its own thermostat and radiator.
During that period the only change to the exterior was the enclosing of the small porch off the kitchen, achieved in a jerry-built way by using discarded wooden windows. Because the wooden staircase that led up to that porch was normally unused -- traffic to the kitchen entered either through the front door or via the door on the terrace -- I closed off that exterior staircase. So this porch became a sunporch one entered from the kitchen, protected from the elements (though not from the cold, and thus not particularly usable in winter).
I also closed off a door that led from an uninsulated sunroom off the ground-floor dining room to the front porch. This sunroom became a combination print-storage space for my growing collection of photographs, library, music room for my intermittent guitar playing, and art studio. It had its own radiator, and I insulated a few areas of it as best I could, supplementing the radiator with an electric space heater.
Some of this qualified as serious renovation, basic and long-overdue retrofitting to bring the house up to late-20th-century standards (the bathrooms) which also involved running some new wiring and plumbing and/or replacing older lines. Beginning to finish the attic augmented the usable space of the house, effectively adding another fully functional floor to the space. Other changes were adjustments to the traffic flow, or experiments in repurposing one room or another. All contributed to exploring what the existing structure would enable, and how it could evolve to suit the demands of contemporary living -- and working, in a home-office context. (Continued . . . )
