Sunday, December 3, 2023
Good morning.
Despite describing my last message as the denouement, here's the real coda to my tales of moving.
I composed this potted and perhaps entirely erroneous history of space allocation in domestic architecture in homes of reasonably (and more than reasonably) affluent people.
Any of you who have visited the palatial homes of multi-gazillionaires of the 19th and early 20th centuries know that the kitchen is out of sight. I think for example of some of the places I've seen: Glensheen in Duluth, Biltmore in Asheville, the James J. Hill House in St. Paul, Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota. Guests did not see nor step into the kitchen; that was the place for the servants and those who prepared the food. Even in the homes of well-to-do, in any upscale neighborhood built before WWII, the kitchen was typically separated from the dining room and other public and social spaces, although maybe guests might wander into the kitchen to talk with family members who were preparing food. Even in our modest 1931 bungalow, the kitchen was separated from the dining room by a swinging door (which my great aunt promptly and sensibly removed and which we found in the basement 50 years later). After WWII, kitchens became more "public" and family and friends weren't hesitant to socialize in them. As time and taste moved on, into the later 20th century, kitchens became more openly connected to dining areas and other social spaces.
After I wrote the foregoing "history"—and I purposely chose the word "potted" because I made it all up—I decided to ask someone who knew about such things, so I wrote to a colleague in Architecture at the U of Minnesota. He wrote back:
You are correct. The open kitchen has had several forces driving it—the disappearance of "servants," especially after WWII; the move away from gendered spaces (women in the kitchen, etc.); the desire for the shrinking footprint of houses to feel larger by combining functions into fewer, larger spaces; and the rising interest in the culinary arts in modern culture, with more people interested in preparing meals.
So there's your architectural history lesson for the day.
To get to my point: Our townhouse represents the apotheosis of the trend. The kitchen *is* the social space, and it happens to have a few adjunct spaces for sitting and dining. The granite-topped island in the center is larger than the floor space in our bungalow kitchen.
One odd story. Moving to the townhouse meant losing much of our hutch cabinet space. Kathy spotted an attractive china cabinet on Facebook Marketplace that was reasonably priced at $275. It had inlaid wood and mullioned doors and appeared to date from early in the 20th century. We bought it; the woman selling it even delivered it. Her partner and I carried it into the house and got it placed. She gave us a business card (thick stock, embossed) with a website and an email address. Fine. A bit later I had a question about the cabinet so I emailed her. No such email. So I went to the website. No such website. What?? Now I'm beginning to wonder if we bought stolen goods. Apart from going to the police and asking, there's not much I can about it.
One side benefit to the move: I finally got to buy a *tall* Christmas tree. Our eight-foot ceilings in the bungalow didn't allow a tall tree. The vaulted ceiling in the townhouse meant I could get a 10' tree. I noted several years ago that Kathy and I counted the ornaments as we took them off the tree in late December; we quit counting at 500. I am sure we easily exceeded that number this year. I also got to put on more lights than ever (over 200 C7 bulbs).
We mostly feel at home now, after five weeks, although we still have a lingering sense, as Kathy put it a few days ago, of "gee, this is a nice place, I'm glad these people are letting us stay here."
I have concluded that the reason people, especially in my age cohort, do not move is because they have to move. If one could wave a magic wand, and have all one's belongings—clothes, dishes, furniture, everything—instantly transported and put in place in a new residence, I suspect that quite a few people I know would move fairly quickly. Alas, there is no such teleporter of goods and the means to put them away. Perhaps an AI robot can put everything away in the future. That assumes you know where you want everything to be put, which we certainly did not before moving in. If the robot put everything away, the robot would have to find it all. Even though we, not our robot, put everything away, not even we could find everything later.
In lieu of a holiday/Christmas card, as always, I wish my friends and relatives a peaceful and happy season and year. I try to interact with all of you during the year (at least electronically) and put a high value on that continued contact. Let's keep that up!
Warmly, and with good thoughts about all of you,
Gary
