A Comfortable Home

I grew up in the ugliest house on the block. This is not to say that the windows were boarded up and paint was peeling off the walls. Although it has weathered a full array of biblical disasters, including floods, lightning strikes, and woodpeckers, the house still stands in more or less presentable fashion, thanks to my ever vigilant parents and their private army of contractors. Instead, the houses ugliness comes from an ambitious idea gone awry. It is the only contemporary house in my corner of Westchester, a neighborhood of tidy arts-and-crafts and tudors that more than one visitor has compared to the Shire, the cozy town of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. The big trees and pretty lawns make it a pleasant place to live, but it is easy to see how an ambitious architect, given a vacant lot, could aspire to build something more at home in the 20th century. This house would not have to be awe-inspiring, but a few clean lines and simple shapes would give the area a much needed contrast. My house is not this house. The essential aesthetic problem of my house is that, like the suburbs themselves, it is based on the car. The facade is dominated by a big garage door, and a paved driveway takes up more than half of the front yard. (By comparison, the house across the street has a small garage tucked to the side of its lot, and presents a large green lawn to passerby). Furthermore, the brick of the garage clashes

with the grey boards of the rest of the building, and the windows are arranged in such a way that the front of the house looks like a surprised bearded man. The house contrasts with neighboring houses not because it is contemporary, but because it is an eyesore. In 2001, my family moved in. Having just learned what a metaphor was, I seized upon the houses ugliness as a way to describe how I felt like I did not fully belong in the community. I made friends easily enough, but the appearance of my home was a constant reminder that I was not quite like them. I would always ask to play at their houses after school instead of mine, preferring to kick a ball on their grass instead of my asphalt. Like me, my house was a newcomer, lacking in local graces. My house had no exposed beams; I knew nothing about sports and could not ride a bike. In my eight year old mind, we were both outsiders, obviously and fundamentally different from everyone and everything around us. However, as time went on and my friends came to prefer video games to physical activities, I welcomed them inside. As much as the exterior bothers me, for as long as I have lived in it the inside of my house has been a delight. My family moved from New York City to Westchester in pursuit of space. Whatever issues we had with the suburbs, we certainly found it. Prior to the move, my parents, sister and I occupied a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment with a kitchen and a living room. It was not large, but within ten blocks of us there were bigger families liv-

ing in smaller apartments, a fact that became ingrained in my brain after hearing my father repeat it to my mother again and again when she first contemplated taking us out of the city. I never felt cramped, but I was much smaller back then. I did my best to protest the move, but my resistance faded after what seemed like an eternity of scouring the tri-state area in search of the perfect home at the perfect price. When they finally found it, I put a temporary hold on complaining and allowed myself to be amazed by the sheer amount of space I now had at my disposal. The house was not massive, but high ceilings and an open floor plan made it seem larger than it actually was. I made a mess of my new room, for no other reason than that I now had a room to make a mess of. We brought far less furniture than the house demanded, and I rode a scooter through the empty living room and hopped on a pogo stick down the bare hallways. My sister and I spent hours playing hide and seek, which had never lasted more than a few minutes in the old apartment. The house was fun, but its backyard was even better. There is a deck at the back of the house, overlooking a small river and the valley it runs through. Houses are visible in the distance but right behind the deck is a sort of wilderness, the perfect antidote to the asphalt and garage in the front. I spent entire weekends hacking my way through the bushes and vines, occasionally recruiting a friend to be the Lewis to my

Clark. This access to the wild had an enormous influence on me, to the point that i used the speech I gave at my Bar Mitzvah to declare that I would one day become a professional explorer. Although I am increasingly more certain that this is unlikely to happen, the adventures I had eventually developed into my belief that an essential role of the built environment is to provide access to the unbuilt environment. Looking back on it, moving to the suburbs held an entirely different significance for my parents than it did for me. While I saw myself as leaving the only home I had ever known, my parents, who had both been raised in the suburbs, were returning at last after an extended experiment in urban living. This was especially true for my father, who had spent the first 18 years of his life in a town only five miles from my house. My parents took on the roles of their own parents, raising children in the suburbs as if they had never left. For a time, they allowed my sister and I to walk everywhere, until our neighbors informed them that the suburbs had become dangerous since their departure and that we now had to be driven. After the initial adjustment, I began to realize that I was now experiencing a suburban adolescence very similar to the ones my parents had forty years ago. We snuck out to drink beer in our friends basements, we spent hours watching reruns after school, we had our parents drive us to school to take the SAT on a Sat-

urday morning. Whether consciously or not, by moving me to the suburbs my parents had put me in a time portal back to the boredoms and thrills of their own teenage years. Im twenty now, but to this day I regard my familys move out of the city as the most significant event in my life. We traded one type of space for a completely new one, and our lives have never been the same. This became clear to me as I watched the friends I had left behind in the city grow up in very different circumstances. They may have been independent at an earlier age, but how many of them had an entire river valley to roam about in? Over time, I stopped missing the city and my ugly house and the land behind it came to form an inextricable part of my identity, an identity that matured on quiet green streets.

My house from the street

The living room