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Finding Home

Some places just feel like home. From the moment you walk through the gate or in the front door it hits you. It makes you want to sit on the porch swing or in the window seat or at the kitchen table. You want to see where the garden path leads and what’s beyond the curve of the staircase. If you’re like me, you’re right away trying to figure it out. Why. Why does this feel so good? What makes it so right? Is it geometry or geography or feng shui? Is it the colors on the wall or the light falling through a window? Is it dumb luck?

There’s an entire television network devoted to that very question. HGTV. That’s Home and Garden Television for those among us who are perhaps less than obsessed. One of my favorites is a dopey, formulaic before-and-after show called “Designed to Sell”. In each episode we meet a homeowner with what looks like a hopelessly bad house. There’s dirt and clutter and the rooms don’t flow, the furniture’s too big and the wallpaper is left over from 1971. How do these people live here? And then we meet the Cruella DeVille real estate expert. She blows through the place and disparages it, room by room.

This bedroom looks like the inside of a rotten tomato.

Is this a living room or a used toy store?

This kitchen is where ugly shades of green go to die.

The poor homeowners are watching on a video link from a neighbor’s house and, as the evaluation continues, you can see them literally flinch. After a commercial break, the Designed to Sell designer, a soothing, optimistic woman playing good cop, comes in to pick up the pieces. She lays out a plan of attack, the homeowners pitch in and, several days, lots of work and $2,000 later, with paint and patching — crown moldings are big — new floors, new furniture, a new window or wall or French door, and the house is transformed. I love the last 10 minutes — the before and after shots during which my husband knows better than to interrupt me. Before, the bedroom looks clunky and clumsy. After, it’s a sleek and spacious ad for Bed Bath and Beyond. Before, the living room is filled with outsized furniture in bizarre configurations, maybe a bit dark and definitely dumpy. After, it’s a page from the Pottery Barn catalog.

You can see the homeowners’ shock. This is my house? If I had known it could look like this, you can see them thinking, I wouldn’t have been trying to sell in the first place. Do I really have to sell? Yes, they do. And quickly. This new illusion they’ve helped create not only gets them the asking price that eluded them before, they often wind up with a windfall from a bidding war. And the irony is, the buyers are falling for a fantasy, for a daydream. They’re paying for these spare, seductive rooms that look great but aren’t truly livable. Put a coffee pot, a toaster, a dish drainer and some dirty dishes into the perfect kitchen and you’re back to the ‘before’ picture. Add a TV and a stereo, piles of books and mail and magazines, a few family photos, scatter around some homework and some cat hair and the living room falls apart. It goes from a blank slate to something very, very specific. That’s what makes a home, the specifics. But specifics aren’t what homebuyers are looking for. They’re not looking for your home. They want the rooms in Martha Stewart Living, perfect orderly rooms with no sign of human contact. They want infinite possibility, a new place with new rooms where they can create a new vision and version of home.

So what is home? It’s one of the first words we learn, one of the first things we draw. Our address is, after our own names, one of the first things we memorize. Home town. Home stretch. Home run. Home page. Home sweet home. And not so joyous ­ nursing home, homesick, homeless. Home at its best, home as the ideal is, for me at least, the past and continuity and the promise of the future. It’s the vessel and the landscape within which we find ourselves and against which we define ourselves. I think most travel writing is really about home — what you love, what you miss, how much separation you can tolerate, how different you can bear for things to be. Have you ever driven past one of your former homes, just to see? If you’ve been lucky enough to be allowed back in by the current owner, it’s an astonishing thing. Yes, it all looks smaller. And darker, The colors just aren’t as rich. Even the things that have stayed the same — the front porch or the backyard elm or a stained glass window in the hall — aren’t really the same at all.

My parents recently sold my childhood home and even though it’s been decades since I lived there, I feel displaced. They bought a condo just a few miles down the road but my mother never settled in. Couldn’t get comfortable. A year later my parents went on a road trip to the southeast. The plan was to check out some pretty towns, possible places to move eventually. My brothers and I were worried — how are they going to manage so far from the network of friends they’ve lived with for 40 years? But as the trip progressed we were reassured. My parents drove through Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Nothing. They visited mountain towns and beach towns and retirement communities where they saw houses and condos and farms and nothing grabbed them. We relaxed. And then, on the last day of the trip my mother called me. “We bought a house,” she said. What? I had spoken to her just an hour before and she had mentioned the appointment. She had bought a house in Florida in one hour? It takes me longer to buy a pair of shoes.

It wasn’t until I went to visit her last year that it made any sense at all. I walked through the front door of the new house and I instantly understood. It’s the same floor plan as my childhood home, only smaller. Exactly the same. You enter into an atrium, to the left is the dining room, to the right is the study, ahead is the living room with a vaulted ceiling. Instead of a fireplace there’s an extra set of French doors, which, this being Florida, lead out onto a lanai, but the rest is the same. Even the furniture is in the same place — the couch and chairs and rugs and paintings. I was completely disoriented. And the funny part was that my mother didn’t see it. “Oh, this house just makes me feel good for some reason,” she said.” The minute I walked in, I felt at home.”

In Malibu, where people often seem to have more money than common sense, we have our share of monster mansions. We’ve also got a monthly magazine called Homes and Land that advertises, with lots of big, voyeuristic, full-color pictures, the local estates for sale. It’s like going to 100 open houses without leaving the couch. The fascinating thing is how certain places go on the market over and over again. They’re beautiful and seductive but they’re simply not livable. They’re way too big, the ceilings are way too tall. There’s too much marble, too many windows, too many rooms, too many steps. Unless you were raised among European royalty and know how to live in a house that big — it’s an art, it’s a lifestyle — these places just overwhelm you. I remember seeing Cher on Oprah once, talking about the big, bloated house she built on PCH in Malibu. She confessed that she and her girlfriends always wind up spending most of their time sitting in the tiny powder room off the master bath. And then a few weeks later, we heard Cher’s house was up for sale.

So really, what is home? I think every photo or mug or plant or stuffed animal we leave on our desks at work is about home. It’s knowing what the rain sounds like on the roof. It’s the dog scratching at the gate, the smell of hot laundry pulled from the dryer. It’s the squeak of the refrigerator door, the echo of our family’s voices in the hallway. It’s the taste of the water from the kitchen faucet, the one we mean to fix any day now. It’s the couch we plan to reupholster, the light bulb that just burned out and will burn out again. It’s a whole that’s much greater than the sum of the parts. And whether we’re seeking it or protecting it or enjoying it or running away from it, I think home is the compass, the true north, of who we really are.