House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  “She’s wonderful,” I said.

  THE KITCHEN

  Good buildings don’t just fulfill existing functions, they suggest new ones.

  —Witold Rybczynski

  ONCE THE HOUSE WAS finally on firm ground again, George’s crew moved in with purpose. They had been waiting more than four months as the foundation process had dragged its way through the best weather of summer. They’d worked on the house like a high-wire act and jackhammered pipe until I worried about their teeth falling out. Now, they were in known territory again, and you could feel their pent-up energy finally gaining a purpose. The house seemed to mirror it, as if having gained a new perspective, it was ready to become its true self.

  I arrived one morning to find the crew in full wrecking mode, facing the wall between the dining room and the yuck room.

  “Ready?” they asked, grinning. They raised their sledgehammers and the wall came down, opening the new kitchen to the rest of the house. It was about time, in more ways than one.

  * * *

  —

  ROWAN MOORE ONCE WROTE, “The placing of the kitchen in a house expresses the relative status of whoever cooks to whoever eats,” and I sometimes think it would be possible to encapsulate the history of a woman’s role in society simply through observing the changing architecture of our kitchens. It’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing, but what is clear is that while sometimes we have shaped our kitchens, they have always shaped us.

  In early rural America, a woman’s role was as a vital member of a family team. Her work was rigorous and backbreaking, the vast majority of it done in the big room that typically made up the main floor of the house. That room was also where everyone gathered, particularly in the evenings, when meals were eaten by the warmth and light of the hearth, and family members sewed, read, and talked.

  Increasing affluence and technological advances changed this dynamic, but, as with the invention of the chimney, often in ways that weren’t anticipated. As houses became bigger, the main floor was separated into several rooms with different functions. The parlor became a place for socializing, while the kitchen was known as the “keeping room”—an apt term, as the women who were once at its center were increasingly marginalized. This trend was only magnified with the invention of the cookstove, which allowed kitchens to be banished to basements, particularly in the city. More and more, domestic labor was being done in isolation.

  It wasn’t until the late 1800s that domestic advocates, such as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, began adding a layer of professionalism to the job. They advocated returning the kitchen to the main floor, and introduced the concept of workstations that organized the room around the various tasks of cooking. To us, this might sound like common sense, but it was revolutionary at the time. Even more revolutionary was the concept of designing a kitchen around the needs of the woman within it.

  Electricity was introduced into many US homes in the 1920s, making housework easier, and allowing more women the opportunity to venture out into the larger world. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—it was at this same time that the commonly used term housekeeper morphed into housewife. The shift was subtle, but the change in connotation was profound: a woman no longer managed her home; she was married to it. And while a keeper could, theoretically, be of either gender, a wife is always female. Words are like linguistic rooms to hold meaning, and, not unlike architecture, they can shape expectations. This one did its work.

  World War II provided a short detour for cultural norms as women were welcomed into the workforce. But when the men came home, it was back into the kitchen for the women—and then into further sequestration, in the “safety” of the suburbs. Neither women nor kitchens were to stay contained, however. Change was coming fast. In 1948, the McDonald brothers opened their first fast-food hamburger restaurant, and the floodgates were opened. And then, of course, there was television. By 1960, there was a TV set in nine out of ten households in the United States, and with their screens came a constant stream of images that alternately supported or questioned the status quo. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, and the first countertop microwave oven came hot on its heels, in 1967.

  By the 1980s, remodels and new house construction began including kitchens that were open to dining rooms or family rooms. You can point to televisions or feminism or suburbs as the likely causes for this architectural phenomenon, but the irony lies in the fact that with its more communal layout, the kitchen returned to its roots as one room for all. What was old was new again. Whether we approach this shift as a restoration or a renovation is up to us.

  The one thing that has stayed remarkably consistent throughout the history of kitchens in the United States, however, is which gender works in them. While there was a significant change between 1965 and 1985 in the ratio of how much time women spent cooking compared to men—a drop from 14.1 times as much to 3.5—there hasn’t been nearly the same progress since. Between 1985 and 2012, that number dropped only to 2.4, and it has shown remarkably little change since. The kitchen may have gotten nicer, bigger, and more open, but as a general rule, it is still twice as much a woman’s domain.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE BEN AND I started work on the house, our ratio was even more skewed than the national average. In the name of efficiency, and without the slightest sense of irony, we had always divided our domestic roles along the lines of what we already did best. Ben did home repairs and earned a living. I cooked and managed the house and took care of the kids. To be fair, we were really, really good at our jobs, and it did save us time—but the difference between routine and rut is not that many letters.

  The house project had been our chance to alter all that, and changes were happening. Given a kitchen without a wife in it, Ben was starting to cook. Out in Port Townsend without Ben to assist me, I was developing confidence in my muscles and opinions. Ben and I were both better at our new roles than we might ever have predicted, and it didn’t hurt the kids to see that. I wanted our new kitchen to be emblematic of that shift, a room that invited transformation.

  * * *

  —

  MY RELATIONSHIP WITH COOKING had already gone through several changes over the years. I grew up with recipes—step-by-step directions that promised, but did not guarantee, success. Ben has been known to point out that in my family we like to be right, but most importantly, we don’t want to be wrong. As far as I was concerned, new recipes were a chance for failure, and, as a result, I stuck to a comfortable few.

  When Ben and I moved in together, I was introduced to a more freewheeling approach to cooking. We were young and short on money, but that didn’t stop Ben’s creativity. He was capable of putting Worcestershire sauce and peaches on a frozen pizza, or adding just about anything in the refrigerator to Top Ramen. I watched him in horror. It wasn’t the food itself, which was often inspired, actually. It was the risk of it. The chance for disaster. In any case, when he got a full-time job, I quickly kicked him out of the kitchen.

  It wasn’t until we moved to Italy that everything changed for me. I remember the first time I went to the vegetable vendor, an old man who owned a small stand not far from our apartment. I told him I wanted to make minestrone soup and asked him which ingredients I should use. He looked at me with that indulgent but slightly mystified expression Italians often give Americans, then opened his arms to encompass the multitudes of his stall and said: “Whatever you want.”

  That single sentence stunned me. I was thirty-eight years old and had no idea of what to do with such culinary freedom. I fled that day, but when I was given the opportunity to take cooking classes taught by an Italian matron, I leapt at the chance. For Ernesta, cooking was a full-body event. It involved hands, not measuring cups. Ears, not recipes. When forced, she would grudgingly write down instructions for her students, but always in Italian and using European measurements. I quickly realized that it was simpler to try and intuit what she was saying, and t
hen it just became easier to do what she was doing.

  Over time, I learned the weight of flour. The smell of just enough sage or salt. The sound of risotto when the grains of rice give that gentle gasp for more broth. I started to think of ingredients as personalities, and to daydream about which ones would want to be together, which ones could make a child’s rough day better or make my husband smile. Cooking this way felt like poetry, not rules. Relationships, not order. It was a language I could speak.

  When we returned to Seattle, it was also a language I could use to lure my children out of their rooms. It had power. I loved teaching it to my children, but, to be honest, I guarded it jealously from Ben. We’d left Italy, a place which celebrated motherhood, and had moved back to a country where stay-at-home mothers were disregarded at best. The reentry was hard for me. Cooking gave me an identity in the way Ben’s job gave him his. I didn’t want to share.

  And yet when we invited people over for dinner, I would always end up incredibly frustrated. Ben would be out in the main part of the house, telling jokes and making sure everyone was having a good time. I was in the kitchen, where I wanted to be—unless, of course, it was where I was expected to be. By the time the food was ready, I was no fun to be around.

  Once a year, generally in January when the weeks were long and wet and dark, Ben and I would have our annual argument, and the topic was always the same—I wanted a more equal division of labor in our household. It got to the point where the fight even had its own name: Party Boy and Kitchen Girl.

  But the reality was I couldn’t have it both ways. If I wanted Ben in the kitchen, I had to let him in, Worcestershire sauce and all. We would have to give up efficiency and continue to step outside of our long-standing roles even after the renovation was complete. In the blank slate of the kitchen in Port Townsend, we had a chance to design a room that could encourage us both to do just that.

  * * *

  —

  WE KNEW WHAT WE wanted: a kitchen that was as honest and straightforward as the rest of the house, with an openness that continued the feeling of an ongoing conversation between a sequence of rooms. I had been reading Sarah Susanka’s Creating the Not So Big House, and Ben and I agreed that it made more sense to have a single eating area, rather than a casual one in the kitchen and a formal dining table in its own rarely used room. Roman’s idea of opening the new kitchen to the dining room would soften the formality of the latter, making it a place that served equally well for morning coffee or a full-family dinner. In addition, by eliminating the need for a kitchen table, we would gain space for more people to cook. An efficient solution, but one that would invite change.

  I had told Roman that my ultimate goal was for what I called a “four-butt kitchen,” with space for four people to cook without banging into one another. I wanted to use the Beecher sisters’ concept of workstations, and line the walls with cabinets, each area with its own function. Bucking popular trends, Ben and I had opted not to have an island in the kitchen, as it would complicate traffic flow. Butts would bang.

  In keeping with our commitment to put infrastructure first and add frills later, we agreed to keep the focus functional and child friendly. The countertops would be laminate—that workhorse of surfaces, a cheap and durable option that forgives knives, spills, and most heat. The appliances would be basic—white, not stainless, affordable and, again, forgiving. They’d be easy to clean off, which meant I would not constantly be following my family around, wiping off the fingerprints that stainless seems to attract like ants on sugar. We told ourselves we could always upgrade later, but for now the practical option also allowed for more experimentation with less stress. If we wanted to change the dynamic in our kitchen, things were going to get messy.

  There was only one problem with the plan: to achieve that kitchen, we needed just a bit more room than we had. And this is where architects earn their keep. When faced with our desire for a larger space, Roman had another ingenious idea—take out the servants’ stairway and give that extra footage to the kitchen, enlarging it to 11ʹ4ʺ × 11ʹ4ʺ. A perfect square for our Foursquare house.

  * * *

  —

  REMOVING THE BACK STAIRCASE would be an unequivocal foray into remodeling—and it would mean I’d have to give up my holier-than-thou attitude regarding the former owner’s decision to take out the front stairs. But I liked the idea of the additional space for the kitchen, as well as the message the new configuration would send. In Roman’s vision, the house would once more be a one-staircase home, but this time with a front stairway that offered transparency and welcome, rather than the connotations of class division and secrecy. If we were opting to use a wrecking bar, it was to create a new, and I hoped better, way of seeing the world. Not to mention a kick-ass kitchen.

  Still, I paused in the decision, thinking about those back stairs and all the memories they held, even for us. We had done our hardest work using those steps, as servants of the house. I knew their every tread, every dip. Already, they were part of my body’s memory.

  And every time I walked by the base of those stairs, I remembered the last day of the trash clean-out, when I’d looked up and seen Ben standing on the landing, a broom in his hand. The way the sun had poured down those stairs later, and the house had seemed to breathe. The lesson my husband and the house had taught me that day. I worried about what would happen to my memories, those lessons, if the staircase was gone.

  Roman pointed out that there was a second and unexpected benefit to removing the back stairs, however. Not only would we have the extra space for the kitchen, we would gain a bonus area at the midway landing, where the two staircases originally met.

  “What about a closet?” he suggested. I nodded. We were short on storage space, after all.

  But then Roman’s face lit with a sudden excitement.

  “What about a reading nook?” he asked, and then I could see it—children, and grandchildren, snuggled up in a spot halfway up the stairs, just like Christopher Robin. A nest for the imagination. It was a gift, when I had been hoping only for a justification. And it would be exactly in the spot on the landing where Ben had been standing that last day of the trash clean-out.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIMES TO CHANGE A culture, we have to build a new room or invent a word for a feeling that has not yet been defined. The Japanese have a term called shibui. There is no equivalent in English, but it comes with the connotations of simplicity and unobtrusive beauty. As Sarah Susanka explains, “Shibui often seems to arise when an architect is striving to meet a particular design challenge. When you stop to think back on houses that have made an impact on you, they’ll often be the ones where an awkward problem has been cleverly solved in a way that makes you think, Well, of course! How else could it be?”

  Those are some of my favorite moments in houses—when you come across the simple, ingenious solution, the thing that sets a house apart or offers you a new way to view your life. In our case, through Roman’s imagination, what had started out as a land grab for extra space for the kitchen ended up quite differently. We got a bigger kitchen to help us change our ways, but we also got a moment of whimsy and quiet on the landing—a place to stop for a moment, listening to people talking in that communal space below, and remember a man with a broom, and the grace that can come with occasional inefficiency.

  DETAILS

  The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.

  —Witold Rybczynski

  THE WINDOWS WERE CHANGING position—not much, just a touch in either direction to accommodate the restructuring of a room or two. Roman had been adamant that we alter the exterior of the house as little as possible, and thus the windows had tiptoed carefully across the plans, and I’d barely seen the change on the paper. Now George’s crew removed the original wind-battered windows and marked them for disposal. Fresh two-by-fours, almost white against the darkened old studs, created a series of clean rectangles for the new win
dows.

  I hadn’t thought it would make much difference—six inches, four—and yet my view of the world outside changed with the new openings. A tree I hadn’t noticed before suddenly made itself known. A stately Victorian house a quarter mile away caught my eye. For years, Ben, an avid photographer, had talked about the placement of the subject in a picture—but it was not until I looked through the new window openings that I understood how fully a small shift can alter our perception.

  Back at the turn of the twentieth century, when houses such as ours were built, windows tended to be smaller, for a variety of reasons. Among them were the issues of heat loss in what were mostly uninsulated dwellings and the cost of precious glass. But Roman had explained that there was another, aesthetic reason that had its grounding in subtlety—a window seen as a frame that suggested a beauty only partially captured, leading thoughts further than the eye. Tantalizing as a path in the woods, its end around a corner, unseen.

  We have less interest in subtlety these days. We want our views unobstructed, with walls of windows to let in the sky. It seems forthright and daring, an unencumbered interaction. But there is something about cutting into a building, altering any of its shapes, that makes you stop and think about what you are doing. Carpenters have a saying: “Measure twice, cut once,” because once the saw enters the wood, you cannot undo what you have done. And so I found myself wondering if perhaps in our American quest to have that bigger window, we were losing the patience for tantalization, for details. A suggestion of beauty needs time to unravel and imagination to wander in. Our lives may have less time for such ramblings, but I still believe the desire for them remains.