One of my earliest memories is of going to open houses on Bainbridge Island with my parents. Bainbridge Island, a suburb of Seattle, is a high-end neighborhood with, at the time, cutting edge Pacific Northwest Design. Think white walls, high ceilings, champagne-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, open great rooms, natural wood windowsills, bannister rails, and doors. Large undivided windows that look out on towering trees and ferns. My parents didn’t want to live on Bainbridge Island; they had bought some land in the woods and were there to poach architectural ideas to incorporate into the house they would someday build.¹

Since those days, I have been obsessed with houses. When mom came to visit, soon after my husband and I got engaged and were shopping for our home, I took mom house-hunting. She enjoyed seeing the range of apartments available but decided for us which one we should buy, which we did not end up choosing. (Not enough building staff, a tiny elevator, tiny kitchen, a huge hallway that wasted space, not enough storage, and in a boring boring boring neighborhood.) I get obsessive about it, drawing floor plans and elevations. Someday, someday, I am convinced, I will own my own dream house, in a pine grove on a cliff overlooking a shore, with a huge greatroom lined with bookshelves, a soaring peaked ceiling, and a tiny bedroom like a ship’s cabin lined in wood upstairs, beside a bathroom with a soaking tub under a window overlooking the water.

This obsession with house design has led me to buy waaaaaay too many books of this ilk, including this one. For a while, I would cruise the House & Home section of bookstores, running my finger along the spines of the books, looking at the publisher’s brands along the base of the spines like tramp stamps, when it landed on one by Taunton (the best of the publishers, in my mind), I’d pull it from the shelf, just for a peek, and end up with an armful of books about cottages, cabins, beach houses, mountain homes, and other cozy designs. I like Susanka’s practical design, the racetrack flow through the open-plan layout, the thoughtful placement of windows, the dual-purpose of some rooms, the natural touches, the different use of ceiling heights to create different feelings throughout the home. There is nothing I hate more than a McMansion with ceilings that soar 20 feet, that allow sound to echo throughout the house.

When I was in high school, I babysat a boy who lived in a big house like that, a long way down a driveway, deep in the woods. His parents, who had hired me to stay with him during the day while they were both working at the GP plant, took advantage of my work ethic by going out drinking every night after work, and the two of us were often left alone in the dark woods until late into the night. The child who was, what we called in those days, hyperactive and yet his parents let him eat junk foods containing red food coloring, which he was sensitive to and exasperated his condition, causing him to have spurts of the zoomies, collapse in a food coma, then erupt in screams unexpectedly.

Late one night, me secretly fuming inside at being left there, yet again, long after the time I was supposed to leave with no word from the parents as usual, the two of us were curled up on the couch in the living room watching something scary on TV because after the nightly news, that was all that was on. The kid had fallen asleep, so I had the TV volume turned down almost to nothing. The only sounds in this big scary house were the sound of the heat blowing through the vents, and the gentle padding of the feet of the family’s eight cats as they roamed the house. The soaring ceiling was in shadows, the dining room, the kitchen, the living room lit only by the table lamp beside me and the light streaming through the kitchen windows from the outdoor light illuminating the front door.

During a commercial, I looked up and noticed that every single cat had made their way from every corner of the house and sitting, lined up, staring intently out the black hole that was the sliding glass door in the corner behind me. I rose, careful not to wake the kid, and snuck over to the window and peered out. Nothing. Just blackness. The cats don’t move, too intent on whatever they’re looking at. I go back to the couch and return to the show.

When the next commercial comes on, I check again. The cats are still staring persistently out the door. Suddenly, as if on cue, there is a swirl of fur and tails, and every cat has retreated back to their favorite perches throughout the house, leaving just the sleeping child and me on the couch. I rise and, again, peer out the door. Still pitch dark, unable to see a thing.

Then the child started screaming behind me, I whirled about and raced back to the couch. Still asleep, he was sitting bolt upright, his unseeing eyes wide open, his piercing screams echoing through the volume of the house, until he finally tips over and falls back into impenetrable angelic sleep. I heard a noise behind me. I turned around, nothing there. Then a noise over by the stairs. Nothing. The phone rang. I answered it, hoping it was the parents, telling me they were on their way home.

“Have you checked the children?” A deep voice inquired.

“Jesus F*cking Christ, Andy, are you trying to give me a heart attack?” I demanded and he laughed, transformed from a horror movie character to a friend from school.

“Your mom told me you were working tonight,” he chuckled. “Want to go to the movies tomorrow?”

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1. And which my mother finally built after divorcing my father. That house looked very much like the houses we looked at on Bainbridge so many years before, updated for the 1980s, right down to the carpeted bathrooms. The house stood for about 40 years before it became too remote, too rural, too big for my elderly mother and she moved to the small town where my sister lives. After much strife and price-drops, the house finally sold. After my mother died, my sister was there doing a college tour with her daughter. They dropped by the house to see it one last time, only to discover that the new owners had torn it down; my mother hadn’t maintained it properly and it had rotted from the bottom up. ↩︎