Not everyone can live like millionaires.
One of the architecturally obsessive things I like to do, sometimes, is house-hunt for fictional characters. This is where Daisy and Tom might live. This is a place like I imagine the Glasses grew up. That sort of thing. I'm not sure when I got into this habit*, but it satisfies my craving for spatial orientation, and besides, it gives me an excuse (uh, albeit a flimsy one) to click around the internet looking at other people's houses.
And I was poking around last night, doing just such a thing, and don't ask me how, but I somehow ended up in Dallas, here, and man, this house. Man, these people. They are so outside my experience that I've been spending the last eighteen hours or so imagining what the hell they could possibly be like. Five bathrooms, one bedroom? In a 7K+-square-foot house? That looks sort of like an extra-double-plus-fancy treehouse? With taxidermied lions and ebony statues, and wildebeest heads tacked to the wall? And what looks like a football-field-sized closet? I mean, seriously, come on, who the fuck are these people?
The house itself, the specific item for sale, is hyperamazing, ultragorgeous, uberextravagant, and a whole lot of other superlatives besides. But it's the whole package, you know, the gestalt of it, that has me kind of dazzled and bewildered (and, I confess, mildly horrified). I like to imagine my fictional characters in concrete spaces, and have for a long time. And I've always adored the process of extrapolation when it comes to people and their houses. I love guessing things about them from the way they inhabit their spaces, and usually they're reasonably accurate guesses. But I just have no idea about these people, and the novelty of that, the sheer arabesque exuberance of the house and the things inside it, is what I'm thinking about today.
Wouldn't these people make a good story? A story that could go just about anywhere?
__________
* ETA: No, I think I do know, after all -- it was when I'd gone back to college, taking a course in women's fiction for fun, and we were reading A Thousand Acres, and Ginny was talking about the house they'd grown up in, a mail-order house called by name, I think The Chelsea but it's been a long time now, and I (longtime fan of mail-order houses that I am, and as who is not?) had a startling moment of revelation: I know this house, this is an actual mail-order house that I know because I fucking know from Sears houses, and I'm pretty sure that that particular collision of discrete interests is what kicked it all off for me.
And I was poking around last night, doing just such a thing, and don't ask me how, but I somehow ended up in Dallas, here, and man, this house. Man, these people. They are so outside my experience that I've been spending the last eighteen hours or so imagining what the hell they could possibly be like. Five bathrooms, one bedroom? In a 7K+-square-foot house? That looks sort of like an extra-double-plus-fancy treehouse? With taxidermied lions and ebony statues, and wildebeest heads tacked to the wall? And what looks like a football-field-sized closet? I mean, seriously, come on, who the fuck are these people?
The house itself, the specific item for sale, is hyperamazing, ultragorgeous, uberextravagant, and a whole lot of other superlatives besides. But it's the whole package, you know, the gestalt of it, that has me kind of dazzled and bewildered (and, I confess, mildly horrified). I like to imagine my fictional characters in concrete spaces, and have for a long time. And I've always adored the process of extrapolation when it comes to people and their houses. I love guessing things about them from the way they inhabit their spaces, and usually they're reasonably accurate guesses. But I just have no idea about these people, and the novelty of that, the sheer arabesque exuberance of the house and the things inside it, is what I'm thinking about today.
Wouldn't these people make a good story? A story that could go just about anywhere?
__________
* ETA: No, I think I do know, after all -- it was when I'd gone back to college, taking a course in women's fiction for fun, and we were reading A Thousand Acres, and Ginny was talking about the house they'd grown up in, a mail-order house called by name, I think The Chelsea but it's been a long time now, and I (longtime fan of mail-order houses that I am, and as who is not?) had a startling moment of revelation: I know this house, this is an actual mail-order house that I know because I fucking know from Sears houses, and I'm pretty sure that that particular collision of discrete interests is what kicked it all off for me.