Homes with a twist

By Charles C. Poling
Editor & Associate Publisher
Su Casa Magazine

I suspect most of us retain a childlike delight in houses that harbor surprises. They don’t have to be wardrobe passages into enchanted realms or doorways hidden in bookcases. Just something unique or an offbeat twist that feeds our imagination and creativity.

In this issue, you’ll find a bathroom with an unusual window between the tub and the adjoining bedroom. (Yes, there I am acting nonchalant during our photo shoot in the picture below.) I’m not sure what purpose it serves, but besides looking great, its uniqueness reflects the one-of-a-kind nature of this Corrales, New Mexico, remodel by builder Dan Keough.
Last year we featured a well-appointed home by H.L. Cleff Construction with a “Juliet” balcony. It was just the slightest cantilevered inside porch overhanging the front foyer from the master bedroom. Purely decorative, I suppose, a conversation piece, but the images of wooing a forbidden lover might ignite a frisky frolic at home.

A Santa Fe bungalow that my children and I scouted once had a peculiar, hobbit-sized room at the top of the stairs on the second floor. It was long and narrow, shaped like a pup tent under the steeply pitched roof gable. The kids slid right into the peculiar space. Naturally, they wanted one at home, and fortunately for me, we lived under a flat roof.

Maybe the hidden surprises are best. A house built by Placitas builder/developer Tom Ashe has a “secret” door just small enough for a child to escape the bathroom and emerge on the first landing of the stairs. After I told my son about it, he snooped around our house looking for

walls where he might construct a secret passage. It probably didn’t hurt that we were reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at the time, a story in which children enter a magical world through the back of a closet.

Another house I visited featured a “bolt hole” that provided an escape route from the armor-plated master-suite closet to the outdoors. The idea was that after you’ve retreated from intruders into this private redoubt, which could withstand small-arms fire for several minutes, you slip away without detection to the bulletproof Hummer in the driveway. I shudder to think of anyone actually exercising this paramilitary option, although the implied allusion to Batman’s Bat Cave was exciting.

The allure of the oddly scaled room, the secret passage, the special balcony, and the bolt hole perhaps derives in each case from a view of home as sanctuary, a feeling most acute in children. Home is their castle, not only in the rug-over-the-kitchen-table-fort sense, but in a more real way as the bastion against the unknown, often scary world.

Since 9/11, the psychology of being American has come to incorporate an unfamiliar vulnerability. Our homeland requires security. Maybe we’re all a little wiser now about the complexities of other peoples’ feelings toward us. Yet as we evaluate the balance of threat and security, we might somehow hang onto the appreciation for a private passageway that leads not from terror, but into wonder. Home should be the place where we recharge our spirit in anticipation of creative challenges. That’s where I want to live.

 
Copyright 2003 Hacienda Press