Two weeks ago, our local high school parents’ organization hosted its annual House Tour in which ticketholders were treated to self-guided tours of five knock-out homes around town. In general, only the largest of homes ever make it to the tour’s short list, and the organizers attempt each year to include a mix of old and new, traditional and more modern. I have attended about eight of these tours over the past ten years, and a few homes stand out as “the best”. One was a totally renovated stone mansion located on a peninsula with about 270 degrees of Long Island Sound views. It was the “country home” for a young couple from New York City and their three children. In the description of the home, one of the attic bedrooms was described as belonging to the “two nannies”. Nice. About 50% of the ladies who entered the room and read that description quietly mumbled something about volunteering to be one of the nannies, myself included. While this home was smashingly beautiful, I couldn’t help thinking what a waste it was for this home only to be appreciated on summer weekends, and mostly closed up for the winter. I also noticed that the carpeting was the same (off-white, short pile) throughout the entire house. Just an observation.
Another home, on the other side of town, won my heart for its charm and grace. Not a mansion by any means, it was an early 20th century colonial with many of its original details intact and, in some cases, enhanced. There were several fireplaces, hand-carved moldings, and a décor that reeked of warmth and hospitality. You could tell, a “real” family lived here, and that they thoroughly enjoyed their home. On the third floor, a beautiful, girly play room had been set up for their three daughters. The oohs and ahhs of the ladies touring the home could be heard for miles around. In fact, the “tour chatter” ripped through the town like wildfire that day – “Oh you MUST go to the Ridge Street house. It should NOT be missed”. Still, to this day, people mention that home as one of their favorites, I think because it was the homiest and most personally (and tastefully, in my opinion) decorated of all the homes that had come before or after it on the tour route.
This year, I did not attend. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the House Tour, but this year I just was not into it, and decided to take a year off. Friends who went said it was not one of the best groups of houses they had seen, although in general the homes were beautiful. One house, that appeared to be decorated in nothing but Ralph Lauren (the wife is apparently a sales associate at the RL store in Greenwich, CT), made one of my friends sad. She said she was sad for the little girl who lives there, because the house lacked any sense of warmth and was more of a museum than anything else. To each his own, of course. It is probably true that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they decorate their home, but where we live, so many people hire decorators to decorate their homes that personality may have less of an impact on design than the power of one’s “purse”.
One of the homes on the tour was advertised as a “Certified Green Home”. Yeah right! This house is brand new, constructed on the edge of a wetland where no house existed before, and it is 6,800 square feet. Apparently it doesn’t take much to achieve green certification these days. A local woman who owns a green consulting service stated (correctly, in my mind) that the greenest home is the already existing home. I have to agree – you cannot disrupt countless living organisms and construct a brand-new mansion that will require monstrous amounts of energy to heat and cool and call it anything even remotely green. It is a joke, honestly. Oh, and by the way, to construct this home, which was built on a subdivided parcel from another estate, a looooooong driveway was carved out of the landscape (we are talking hundreds of yards) and paved over. Increasing the paved area anywhere in this town is a hazard because we are a waterfront community and have tremendous flooding issues.
Anyway, as I think about the truly green way of living – via “reduce, reuse, recycle” – I become more inclined than ever to find the most efficient floor plan for my own house. As much as I would love a more traditional “looking” home, a small addition to this house will give us what we desire without greatly increasing our carbon footprint, or wasting the positive attributes of the existing structure.
