Brand New Townhouse

Photo courtesy Flickr

“Unfinished things have more life.” ANDRE'E PUTMAN

A tradesman let me slip behind his back for a quick afternoon tour of new construction a couple of blocks away. It was a treat to see what 2010 has brought to the neighborhood. We agreed that the world of design has learned a lot in the last hundred years. His house dates from 1914, mine from 1890.

The townhouse I visited had four narrow floors from garage to master suite, and I could easily transfer my life into that environment. The architect had taken masterful advantage of the views, and the same square footage that seemed like mean-spirited profiteering in a unit several blocks west felt like elegant relief from maintenance in this place.

In a perfect world, townhouses would be designed with a potential elevator shaft to soften the effects of any future disability.

Writing about “drab” yesterday, I realized that the cool whites and brushed chrome hardware of this new building would be a good setting for many high-tech vintage furnishings that look eccentric in twentieth-century architecture. The first thing that came to mind was the chromed brass hardware on a high-end late nineteenth-century medicine cabinet. Vintage medical storage cabinets would look wonderful in an immaculate new townhouse, and they’d enrich the surface textures of brand-new wallboard, glass that hadn’t begun to flow in the slow relaxation of its essentially liquid nature, and the patented wood flooring whose grain has yet to mellow through seasons of shifting temperature and humidity. However, this unit is so sophisticated that freestanding storage units may never be necessary.

Old canning jars with zinc tops, solid white restaurant china, Navy surplus stainless steel tableware (by Tiffany, no less), white woven plastic tarps as curtains, white Remay featherweight polyester agricultural fabric, butcher paper tablecovers, and chromed wire storage shelves on wheels would all be a hoot to work with in a spanking new interior. Those adjustable storage racks make fine movable screens when their backs and sides are covered with, in my case, lightweight woven wicker garden fencing secured with zip ties, and I could see using them as a substitute for curtains. Covered with grommeted translucent white material of some kind and with cupboard strip lights under each shelf, a rack unit would function as a storage curtain floor lamp. Stanley’s grommet kit costs about a third of one from a sewing store.

Even in its unfinished state, this townhouse has the formal composure of a photographic print and will no doubt be as flattering a setting for the owners as it is for the static furnishings it now displays The whole composition speaks of elegant minimalism.

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