Downsizing in place left us with an empty basement, two slick porches, and a guest room devoid even of guest. It is deeply soothing to know that the peripheral rooms in the house are under control, with no dormant inventory moldering in place.
It’s easy to control allergens and stale pheromones in a room with nearly nothing in it, and it’s heartening to know that if we suddenly want a good few cubic feet of space, it’s ready.This house was built before people had living rooms,
when the residence was a center of production rather than consumption. To the left of the front hall, just outside the main traffic pattern, is a formal parlor, and to the right stands the family parlor with the kitchen just off it.
I was fortunate to have been shown a similar place when we first moved here: a handy man gave me a tour of the first floor of a house he’d been tending for years. The ancient mistress had just moved into a nursing home. Her
family parlor was set up as it must have been in 1900, with a generous walnut desk in the corner, a dining table, and some congenial upholstered furniture. The atmosphere was of cluttered comfort, convenience, and deep familiarity. It was not a room for the eye, but it was very appealing: archaic, but not an old lady’s space.
As I look back on the twenty or so places I have lived, I can’t think of any of them where it would not have been possible to divide the space into formal and family parlors. We use the formal parlor as a music room, which means every day we benefit from the cost of owning it.
When I was growing up, I overheard many conversations between matrons about floor plans. Energy and resources were cheap then, and
it was assumed that a given room had a fixed function. For the things I do and the way I like to live, that point of view amounts to going through life with my shoes on the wrong feet. Weather Report’s song “Put It Where You Want It” set me thinking about the uses of domestic space, and Sir Terence Conran’s
House Book opened my eyes to the adaptive reuse of old houses and old furniture. The book is hilariously dated now, unless you’re designing sets for a play about the Sixties, but the technical information has not been bettered.
At the moment, the family parlor is the room we are heating, and simply occupying the space generates the initiative to get things done.
Moving the rolling tool cabinet into the kitchen reduced turn around time on projects from months to minutes. With the best loafing chair in one corner, a music system to one side, and a stack of dairy crates holding discreet projects, we can knock off one ossified chore after another with no effort, simply because there’s no commute.
The key to the system is keeping poison under control.
It’s toxins that generate segregated work space in the house, just as pesticides segregate the garden into ornamentals and food.
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More after the jump.