When I miss my friends, I miss their homes, too. And their porch fans, garden gates, pergolas, fern-filled sunrooms—where they live their lives. I often walk through their houses, especially when I’m thousands of miles away. Every room resonates with my friends’ presence, as though I’ve made a memory palace of their homes. Foyer with thirty mirrors, fireplace constantly blazing, creaky stair landing, back hall full of boots, but above all the dining room, where we’ve gathered for quick lunches, feasts, holidays. I can see my friend enter, smiling, the coq au vin or the soup tureen held aloft. Studies and living rooms—all the book launches, wedding (even divorce) celebrations, and birthdays. Political fundraisers and book groups and writing groups or just an evening of movies. Their rooms reveal: a sense of humor or gloom, pretentions, solitude, exuberance, introversion, or longing for light.
What an intimate act, to invite someone into your home. There’s Steven, in situ. Three Stevens! Judy, Jackie, Debbie, Ondine, Coco, Silvia. They flash in memory framed by where they live, never more vivid than in their rooms. I’m touching their things chosen from travels, the collections (glass sea buoys, julep cups, vintage matchbooks from Paris, aluminum colanders—weird stuff!), fabrics, kitchen knobs, desks cluttered or precise. Even their closets. Are Aziz’s socks ironed? Although some of the friends I conjure in memory no longer exist, the green glass lamp still shines on Bill’s desk where he wrote poems. From under the bed, a glimpse of his blond wig. Don’t ask. I can see the view of three bridges from Jackie’s top floor and push aside Judy’s student papers from her kitchen table so we can sip her bergamot tea. My lost friends’ rooms return them to me briefly and also bounce back my own sense of home. I walk the rooms of houses I’ve lived in. What became of the coral sofa, the rolltop desk, the blue-and-white plates?
Objects become illuminated. They speak Robin, they speak Toni and Shotsy, they speak Michele. Like saints’ palm fronds, dogs, keys, scallop shell, lion, book, my friends in their private havens have their attributes. Make a home and it will say who you are and maybe why. Objects chosen, displayed, cared for, they’re like the salt, milk, wine, dishes, and lamps that Romans offered to the lares, household gods.
On an insomniac night, I see Ippy stepping out onto her back porch for a moment of overlooking the pond. When she and Neil had a book party for me, a neighbor boy rowed a young flautist in a yellow canoe across the pond and the silvery music and the apparition of the girl in white standing in the canoe reached everyone sipping wine in the yard. We hushed. From the front, the dark wooden house lies low, as serene and austere as a Japanese ryokan. The facade looks closed and gives nothing away. You announce your arrival with a thump to a gong, which still reverberates when the door flings open. The back, all windows, faces Frog Level Pond. Ippy, on her porch, may now be seeing that drifting canoe scene. She slides the door and goes into the house. Clean lines, watery light, gray cat, bold art on every wall, some of the paintings hung way lower than eye level just to make you see. She’s headed for her studio, intent, but I stop her in the living room. This audacious choice. Against a wall of windows filled with blond light, a long, curvy, sexy velvet sofa. Pink. Pale pink. Surely she was told it is too much, she’ll tire of the color, powder-puff pink, pink as a mimosa blossom, pink as the nacreous inside of a shell. She won’t. She lives with certainty and originality. When I go to Ippy’s house, I feel lifted as soon as she opens the door. The house is all her and the welcome is palpable.
To get to Jane’s, I turn off and bump and jounce until I come to a yard full of odd bits that may be placed or maybe have been dropped. Carts, statues, twisted iron sculptures (or just twisted cast-off iron), pots with long-dead agave and aloe plants. And there’s Jane in the kitchen. Skillets, glasses, knives, dishes cover every counter. She has made twelve tomato pies. There’s the wine, have some. Jane’s clay sculptures, books, more books, squashed-down chairs where you really can read. Who’s staying over? Always there’s a guest or two and an unmade bed. Unobtrusively hanging over a chest, the painting of a woman; the signature of the artist makes your eyebrows rise. Really? This is a museum of sorts. The long table she sets with unironed linen and gay abandon but with many candles. Flowers in small crystal vases and jelly jars. Generous platters make the rounds. Always on hand, a country ham. Have more. She saves the printed sacks they come in. By note or email, she has invited everyone. (She does not speak on the phone.) “Come for Billie Holiday’s ‘Summertime,’ and low-country boil.” At Christmas, she passes to us her collection of falling-apart black hymnals and we sing—loud, exaggerating the stars are brightly shining. It is the night…Crab time. Corn time. Truffle, peach, cherry. Grab the occasion and celebrate. The kitchen ferments with what’s ripe now. From afar, walking through her house, I pause in the bathroom. It’s crowded with baskets of towels, a stack of magazines, perfume bottles and lotions. Regulated to a wall at the corner by the sink, there’s Jane as a young Virginia Woolf–type beauty in black and white. That far-past-you gaze and good bones. One of the Olympians.
Lee’s big place sits way back from busy Churton Street on a raft of buttercups. Lee’s big heart and mind. The old place was gussied up with trim during the Victorian era but underneath remains the four-square structure with the separate red-brick kitchen building still standing. We could be inside a house that’s in one of her novels. We’re almost always on the front porch or at the kitchen table, which is never without several vases of flowers, The New York Review of Books, a plate of pastries, the daily New York Times—still in the print version—and books read, yet to read, or to pass on. I will leave with at least two. Manuscripts from aspiring writers used to be stacked on the kitchen table, too. Now they’re arriving digitally but still in droves. She will comment on every one. (It’s rumored she’s a saint.) Even the invasive will never know when they’ve intruded on her time. Four ladies in search of the antebellum Burwell School wandered in the front door and began chatting and looking around. Lee emerged from her writing trance and ended up giving them a tour of her own house, then tea. From Lee’s upstairs study, her prodigious works emerge. The house cooperates. From the front yard, we watch the town Christmas parade. Rugs are spread and cookies passed around. And at her annual holiday party with two Christmas trees, the bar is set up in the hall, and a burgeoning number of guests pick at the pimiento cheese and biscuits and chicken skewers in the dining room. Once a stranger walked in thinking he was at another address, liked what he saw, stayed to party, and no one asked, Who are you? That kind of house.
Kate’s house haunts me. Kate curled by the fire with her iPad. Warhol’s Richard Nixon over the fireplace always grated. That was one thing I never understood, when her taste was for hand-woven rugs, folk art, antique textiles. Must have been that second husband. How could she look at a Nixon smirk every day? But we all loved the fall concert in that spare, elegant room with Cole Dalton playing the piano, and the hour after when we honored him, and the sweet occasion created by Kate. She and I had many secrets. How we laughed. Maybe we regretted some of them later. Kate’s workroom, where she created Joseph Cornell–like dioramas at the expansive long table spread with her collages, poetry notebooks, sketched images. She was attracted to powerful men but had their number. She and I pored over the letters her father wrote home from World War II. He was a liberator of Dachau. What to do with this stash of letters from a boy from Cameron, Missouri, who would return and take over the family cemetery monument business? Kate, her wispy beauty. Her Woodside house, essential California, which she, too, became. When cancer struck her spine, she was (outwardly) upbeat as always, baking brown butter plum tart, reading literary travel books, taking long walks with friends when she could. The family swirling around. When the time came, her bravery shocked me to my feet. Her decision is one no one should ever have to make. It came down to her, great lover of her life, in her glass and shiny wood haven, to raise the glass of water and swallow a pill. I’m imagining Kate at that moment, more alone in her home full of light than I can fathom. Even the decision: Where shall I lie down? There, on her daybed covered with kilims and pillows. Late-day slant of light bouncing off the glass walls from the western evening. The many windows overlooking her drought garden will not reflect her yoga poses.
Fred and Jimmy, Jimmy and Fred. Far in the country Fred and Jimmy live in two structures, a weathered board house where they sleep, and a repurposed barn where they work, cook, entertain. Private and public. On their land, they’ve built a pyramid thirty feet high of hog wire with a narrow opening to the interior. In summer, morning glories, gourds, and squash climb the wires, creating a green secret space where you sit inside on funky lawn chairs and have a glass of rosé and think you’re in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Pergolas, a little pond, surprising beds full of specimen plants (meaning “What is that, Jimmy?”). In a dusty room adjacent to the barn, Fred keeps his three vintage Alfa Romeos, each in different stages of restoration. A succulent-lined wooden walkway leads into the studios and living space. Their bookcases are arranged perpendicular to the wall like library stacks. Around the perimeter, space is left for changing exhibits of Jimmy’s line drawings and Fred’s paintings. Also in the dining room, the walls provide a moveable feast for artworks. These glimpses tell a lot about who these two men are and why they are alluring. But another thing—the summer dining room. Left on the property, near the barn, stands a weathered-to-a-sheen wooden tobacco-drying structure from another era. About the size of a one-car garage, open on both sides, the structure leans a bit. Racks at the top held the tobacco leaves. It stands empty except when we have dinner there on summer nights, a breeze off the pond blowing straight through. They’ve set a raw board table with silver and lanterns and armfuls of wildflowers and weeds. Fireflies sail through. Gazpacho, herb-crusted rack of lamb, little greens, Atlantic Beach pie. The deep country sounds of tree frogs and owls and something scary howling. Black night, our faces around the table burnished in candlelight. This kind of night brings out stories. At home in their home. Talk. Talk. Talk.
Ann’s house—one of the oldest in Chapel Hill. Prim and upright, facing historic Franklin Street, which should have been protected from traffic but was not. All the lovely old houses pounded by noise. You can imagine the former leafy neighborhood of yore, gracious professors’ homes, but now most have become sororities and fraternities, who were allowed willy-nilly expansions so that Ann’s house is the petunia in the pumpkin patch. During fall rush, as we sit out on the backyard patio sampling Ann and Randall’s exquisite hors d’oeuvres, we hear the Chi Omega (ah, my old sorority!) sisters chanting about how great they are. I’m sure they are. Randall, a trial lawyer, will bring up politics and soon we’re raving, loud as the coeds. Ann grew up here, adored her grandfather, whose house this was. He is revered as an enlightened president of the University of North Carolina. There’s the original sprigged wallpapers against which Ann has hung, above her grandmother’s piano, an oversized photograph of an androgynous child in drifty white, and a dramatic shot of wildfires raging across California in the narrow hallway. There’s a shot of a prisoner at Guantánamo and a portrait of Edna Lewis, one of Ann’s idols. Who can explain the back sunporch furnished with tramp art—pyramidal squat table and floor lamps made from popsicle sticks, other tables from crates, and humpy cane furniture. A hanging lamp from pick-up sticks. At her oval dining table, Ann lights many votives. Because Ann is droll, a perfectionist, and likes to surprise, we sit down to eat what we’ve never tasted before, a little soup of radishes and curry, quail stuffed with pecans and herbs, long simmered in cognac, a tian of vegetables arranged like a mosaic. Monograms on vintage linen napkins rise like veins on the hands of Grandmother Stewart. And always flowers. Not roses or sunflowers but seductive ranunculus and anemones in julep cups. The past has been brought along, not sent to the attic. The grandparents, long interred, could join us for dinner.
Steven and Randy named their house It Had Wings after an Allan Gurganus (a neighbor) short story. When I saw the I-beam-shaped white board house, I thought the name meant that once the house had wings that perhaps had burned. Also, its square-columned, small porch reminded me so much of the house where I grew up that it seemed spooky. Is it spooky? In a good way. These are two collectors—wait, maybe one impassioned collector and one smiling enabler—whose acquisitions overrun any idea of a normally furnished house. Their obsession: architectural models of vernacular American structures. There was one, bought on a whim. Then a few more. Now the holdings have caused the construction of Georgian outbuildings—small temples—holding more and more of the miniature meticulous churches, railroad stations, hotels, residences, courthouses, stores—I don’t think there’s a doghouse, but maybe. Hundreds. Some are lit and you imagine the life within. Tiny furniture and organs and pews and church bells. All need dusting from time to time. A few feathers from the duster catch in shutters and chimneys. Whimsy became world-class collection. They live there. The cat steps gingerly over and around the thousand models, miraculously not overturning. The real rooms squeeze in a piano, a bed, a dining room table, a charming and cozy living space albeit hemmed in by the darling structures and the walls covered with oil paintings of, yes, early American houses. At the constant parties, Randy steps back with his enigmatic smile but Steven speaks up for all the celebrations in his ken. Any artist visiting our town is feted (watch your elbows) and welcomed with rhyming verses and toasts. Any local who has published or displayed or acted, or just had a birthday, gathers for champagne. Imagine the collection after midnight. Do the inhabitants of the models resume a life? Steven and Randy are dreaming. Is Randy dreaming of minimalist rooms while Steven fantasizes about finding an early model of the White House? When they are gone, what becomes of this quirky and magnificent collection? Maybe it will be moved out into some rigid space where schoolchildren will be brought and lectured to about nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. For now, it’s ours, friends of Steven and Randy.
Michael mourned Burnside, his old house where he could have string quartet concerts for fifty. The dining table extended to seat our intimate circle of twenty-five friends, aka the Revelers. The dreaded word downsize was thrown at him by his more practical wife, Maureen, who might have been tired of manning the giant mower, managing and performing constant repairs to the venerable property. We all hated the sale. The place was part of our psyches, too. Burnside centered our community. Auctions for charities and fundraisers for reasonable candidates were held on the lawn; in winter the doors opened to New Year’s galas and poetry readings, even memorial services. New Yorkers moving south snapped it up. The grand piano was given to a local singer. The gate was closed for good. In the seven-block move, the family silver was lost. Soon Michael didn’t have time to mourn. While he traveled with us and other friends to Puglia, Maureen announced by phone that she’d bought the King Street Tavern, an eighteenth-century watering hole near downtown. Long since converted to a residence, the house still needed massive work. But after, what a charmer for retirement. Lock and go. Focus and write. They transformed. Suppers in the low dining room ensued. A copper tub graced Michael’s bath. A room under the eaves, now whimsically wallpapered in blue toile, looked like Jane Austen slept there. The odd slopes of the garden were revised to advantage, and further improvements were planned. Maureen began to write a book in the tiny English-style study, all prints and firedogs and a desk under the window. She felt at home. Michael complained. There was little space to entertain. He knew about himself but knew it hard now. So that’s home to him. Where one’s friends come. I was vaguely looking at houses for sale. When I saw the wretched two-story colonial just up the street from them, I called. “Let’s go look. It has good bones.” The widow Ray had died, without ever updating since the 1950s. There was everything to do—porch, windows, leaky sunroom, heat, air, kitchen. But the double living room with gracious windows, wide porch, numerous big square rooms, hinted at the expansive feel of Burnside. We stood there in the wreck envisioning linen curtains billowing at the long windows, a snuggery with deep chairs, and a wall of books. But no one was crazy. This house required another round of devotion ever so much more ardent than restoring their current house. One night after dessert at the Tavern, Michael looked up at the low ceiling, poured a splash of wine, and said, “This house makes me feel like I’m in a coffin.” A silence fell around the table. Home was not going to happen. After that, Maureen agreed that they were brave enough for one more reno. So it began at the widow Ray’s. Two years in, there’s still work to accomplish, but the foyer is papered in red and black monkeys—how bold. The huge plywood kitchen transformed first. We gasped! Pink tile, begone. A new copper tub, the attic morphed into a study. Maureen’s birthday was just celebrated. Lanterns along the still-rough porch, the long table set with new silver, thanks to insurance. We were in Italy but heard the music.
If ever I could believe in elves and fairies, no kidding, it would be in the Tuscan chestnut forest where Susie and Rowan live. The massive trees spread into a canopy of gold in fall, green-lit in spring, and weighted dark shade in summer. Porcini mushrooms thrive, perhaps giving rise to the fantasy that fairies might shelter beneath them. Fiat-size stones rest where they tumbled a millennium ago, old gods churning up the earth. Skirting a ridge, you catch glimpses far below of the Val di Chiana spreading flat and verdant to the horizon. Yes, they are isolated up here. Miles from their friends in Cortona. Home was Melbourne but not now. They have visceral connections to their aerie. I saw the house and I was home. Sounds familiar to me. After you wind through the mythic forest, the white road ends at a long stone farmhouse with attached greenhouse room. Much of the action takes place in this light-lifted space. Usually, we are ten at table. The courses roll out, sometimes nostalgic curries, lamb, and Pavlovas. She even makes a delicious carrot cake, and I’ve never liked carrot cake. Rowan knows his vino and often blind pours, asking us to guess. He must often be disappointed as we flail and hold out the glass for more. These two sunny Aussie extroverts throw lavish picnics and luncheons that seem professionally catered and served, though there’s no hired soul at all. Lunch will go on until five and there’s the day gone. Up here above the olive line, you sense a bit of magic. What do friends do? Talk. After one dinner we shared, Susie wrote to me about the evening’s conversation. We covered, she said, “From medical assessments to books (of course), faith, dishwasher-stacking, God, linen-folding, the meaning of Home and place, music, poetry and genius, introversion, COVID, musical theatre and West Side Story (‘It’s on in London! Let’s go!’), beauty and Venice (‘Let’s go now! We’ll be there by 1 a.m.!’), farting pigs and belching cows, San Marino (‘The only region I haven’t been to—let’s go NOW! We could be there by 3 a.m.’), cliffs and beaches (a chorus of ‘I want to live there, if I can’t live here!’), hearts, other lives in San Francisco, Denmark, North Carolina, and Australia, passion, the Olympics, the superiority of dogs, the names we wanted to be called, Cortona’s festivals and…The tune was lively, with many crescendos splitting the peace of the nearby cinghiale, wild boar. We loved it all.” Everyone loves a circle of warmth and spontaneity. But back to the isolation. Here’s the thing. Those friends, who spark such conversation and pleasure in their company, close the door behind us and retreat into profound solitude. They’re gardening, reading, planning—what are they doing up there? Perhaps they’re close to the huge stone fireplace, writing, telling stories exactly where contadini (farmers) used to sit recounting stories with vin santo to double warm them. Often no one sees them for days. They thrive inside their four walls. Why else select a house so far into never-never land?
At Susan’s white brick house, open the yellow door and what’s the aroma? Cardamom, cumin? Fenugreek? She wins for most coveted dinner invitation. Not wanting dark wood in her house, she painted an extendable Duncan Phyfe–style table with several coats of white. In the corner of the dining room, Scruffy, mongrel dog of the soulful eyes, attends all parties from his bed. He has at least fifty toys that he transports up and down the stairs. If hors d’oeuvres have been forgotten in the living room, he instantly scarfs up a plate of salumi or a bowl of nuts. In this house, guests are not allowed to help serve or clear. Susan does everything. Her mission: She will feed you. Feed you so well. Why aren’t Michelin stars handed out to home cooks? Always there are bouquets in the kitchen, on the dining room table, and on the round table by her kitchen window, where we plot what we will cook when and who will come. We have a cookbook project in the works and try to get the recipes organized and divvy up who’s testing what. We exchange news. Samia is going to Egypt, Tom is having a knee replaced, Susan is raising funds for Afghan refugees. Have you seen the bodacious purple clematis in bloom on Hope Street? So much to say. We admire the pale aqua glassy tiles and the good cabinetwork from the recent remodel. For seven months, she cooked with a microwave at her desk upstairs and a gloom descended on the house during the kitchen exile. As if a tourniquet had tied off her creativity. I’m inspired by her ambitious duck confit, preserved lemons, cassoulet, and, she announces, she’s about to go through the whole Turkish repertoire. Talented as she is in the kitchen, she has a poison thumb in the garden. Her patio pots languish, except for one curry plant that merits her attention. During lockdown, she continued to entertain, with all the gloves and wipe-downs and distancing we had to practice. Out of the dining room, with its Provençal checked clothes and pretty dishes, we marveled at what was served on paper plates at little tables outdoors. It seemed like dead geraniums were commenting on the situation we found ourselves in. But we had bright stars through the oaks. The talk was good, and Ed could always find the songs someone thought of and play them on his device. Often, we turned up “Goodbye to You” and sang it to the virus and the lax politicians and whatever had landed us outside the comforts of home. Fanciful, but from here in Italy, I can see Susan, all five burners ablaze, stirring the pistachios into the lemon cream for pasta. The table is set. I even know who’s coming for dinner.
At Allan’s, the jungle-fever ferns, canna lilies bright as roosters, and looming banana plants envelop you as you approach his yellow shingled and gabled early Victorian. On the wraparound porch, one literary luminary or another might be sipping wine and trying Allan’s perennial shrimp plate. Drop-in neighbors are welcome, too. When you enter the foyer, the feeling is kaleidoscopic. Papered in a nostalgic William Morris willow-leaf pattern, the walls are covered in early-American reverse-painted mirrors. In this romantic, quirky house, Lewis Carroll or A. A. Milne could live, even Beatrix Potter, but instead of her pots of paint, stacks of books grow. Beside chairs, on tables, shelves, books everywhere. Where you might expect a vase of daffodils on the dining room table, ramous branches of dog rose entwine into the chandelier. Where you think a desk should be stretches a room-length surface piled with papers. Above, normal windows have been replaced with a reclaimed gothic church window. They overlook the Presbyterian cemetery of mossy stones and leaning obelisks and sunken gravestones. Like Allan’s paraprosdokian sentences (the first half is disrupted by the last half), the syntax of the rooms is surprise. Coral walls, black-and-white floor, globes, sculptures, especially heads, masks. A maximalist resides here, and why would his prose be any different? Home, where there’s freedom to invent, to subvert. Clear that someone pays no tax to Caesar. The house always has spirits but especially on Halloween when Allan and pals perform political morality plays for the innocent kiddies expecting miniature Snickers. A line forms all the way to the corner, and no child will forget that thrilling night in the haunted house when politicians rose from their coffins and repented.
It’s difficult to track Elspeth because I don’t know her home of the moment. Five years ago, children suddenly grown, Els and Clay began a vagabond existence. She stages luxury houses that are for sale. He’s in real estate. (At this point, home may be three adjacent storage units filled with their furniture.) I’ve seen English engravings of eighteenth-century agricultural workers migrating to the next seasonal job. The moves were called “flitting,” which makes it sound easy. Carts piled to teetering, even the children carrying pots and pans. Els stuffs her Suburban, calls a mover. They juggle sofas, headboards, paintings, picking from their stash what fits the next place. They’ve got it down. Pack, go, unpack, order in, style, live there until the house sells. Sometimes two months, sometimes six. We visit and feel like five-star guests. Then they relocate. They exemplify John Keats’s Negative Capability—to be capable of “being in uncertainties” without always reaching for conclusions. A state open and ready. How long, I ask, until you feel at home? Els answered easily. Three days. By then the herbs and spices are in alphabetical order. Advantages: no clutter accumulates. They’ve left behind seventeen houses. Each was unmistakably Els’s house. I may see her in the Georgian mansion, but she’s moved on to Tudor or Tuscan or Provençal. They settle into one posh place after another, and another…Don’t holidays blur? Don’t you miss the one with the covered pergola and tiled pool? Don’t you always have to have everything tidy? Yes, yes, and yes.
Margaret’s home, like my other friends’, could only belong to the owner. But more so. A former fishing camp, primitive and slapped together, became her eccentric perch on the Eno River. She and her friends gather to make things. Papier-mâché lanterns, quilts, costumes for the parades, or plum jams in the bright blue tile kitchen. Art structures from found materials. In the living room sits a vintage barber’s chair. I said quirky, didn’t I? Pretty stones and twisted pieces of wood. Most heavenly—a two-story screened porch where she can sleep upstairs on a pile of quilts, sequestered, as in a treehouse, with the musical falls of the river over rocks. Margaret loves the seclusion of the woods and all its snakes, turtles, skunks, foxes. She collects photos of initials and hearts that lovers have carved into bark around her forest. On walks, she spots the wild ginger, the hawk, what the owl coughed up. When the pond before her house floods her road, she can enter only via a raised catwalk. Then she’s up on the rise where the cabin stays dry, and she’s detached from the fray. Porches here and there, made for comfort. She’s on her own terms. What a solace from her job of exposing sex trafficking, and writing grants for agencies to fight it, giving seminars to awaken organizations to the breadth of that evil. There’s the path to the river, where she also can lie out in the sun naked on big flat boulders. Or fish or wade. The river is the architect of the house.
At Francesca’s cottage on the edge of the woods, a screen is set up on the deck. On benches and makeshift chairs, we’ll be watching De Sica movies tonight. Maybe Bicycle Thieves or Marriage Italian Style. (Please, not the horrific Two Women.) Her home does not reflect her. Vivid she is; the house remains a neutral backdrop, a place to perch, ready to fly. There is a cat. There is a vegetable plot. But Francesca is on the move, designing stage sets, traveling to Argentina to tango, losing herself in her memoir of her outrageous Italian ancestors. During Covid lockdowns, she devised an odd quest: daytrips to visit all the county courthouses in North Carolina. Francesca casts her bread upon the waters. Her house says, I don’t have to live here. She may reside permanently in the States, but I see her most clearly in the villas and farms in the country of her birth. As if this life has detached from the real and is spinning a new orbit. We friends love the exploits of the talented, larger-then-life, difficult Italian family she comes from. There has been much to forgive, and she has accomplished that. An American cottage is the last place one would imagine she would settle. But here she is, among us. She’s designing toys and a complex puzzle, probably googling flight departures to FCO. When the film starts, the house disappears. Popcorn, owl calls, wine, flickering light.
Jean’s dining room window frames a classic view of the Tuscan hills, vineyards, the noble profile of Cortona in the distance. You could be standing in that spot for hundreds of years and nothing would have changed. Is this the most peaceful landscape in the world? Along a kitchen counter, maybe one hundred identical jars line the wall. They hold every bean, spice, grain, herb known. Any old nonna can set to cooking right here. The restoration shows impeccably the volumes of the structure, untainted by competing messages to the eye. The rest of the house is starkly, elegantly minimalist, almost anonymous. Black-and-white photographs identically framed. White sofas. Glass, spare white rooms, the plaster smooth as boiled frosting. She and Aziz are not tempted by the local antiques and paintings, or the colorful majolica. The plates are white. Open a kitchen drawer to be dazzled by the surgical layout of the whisk, knives, and spatulas. There’s the creeping feeling that these worldly, funny, acerbic people might just be more evolved than you are. While most of us in old houses have our clothes jammed into armadios, they turned a narrow room into that rare local commodity, a closet. We’re getting a little private here, so just to say, I imagine a queen’s wardrobe could aspire to be this orderly. No shoe has a crust of dirt. No dry cleaner hangers and plastic allowed here. It’s all serene and they are not especially serene people. There’s usually a drama unfolding. There’s the key. As Wallace Stevens wrote:
The house was quiet because it had to be
The quiet was part of the meaning…
Coco lavishes her considerable energies on her Tuscan house. She’s situated just below Le Celle, the ancient monastery where Saint Francis spent a winter and where a few Capuchins remain. They stride along the road like kindly spirits, white hair flying, sometimes barefooted. They, the ones whose brown robes and white trim gave cappuccino its name. There’s a holy aura to the densely wooded surroundings. Maybe the bells resonating across the hills, maybe the great rush and fall of spring water before the stacked golden beehive of the great edifice, maybe the Stations of the Cross walk that threads up the terraced land. Coco’s house falls under that benevolent aegis. It even has a stark small chapel with a consecrated altar. What luck—few interior designers get to restore chapel interiors. At the Arezzo antiques market, Coco found suitably austere chairs and religious statues and paintings. Not especially religious, she and Jim just thought the house required this respect. Their pale stone villa rests on a plinth of arbored roses and mounds of hydrangeas, with lavender paths leading into the hills. She and I share the house obsession. Our texts focus on desks, colors, tiles, fabrics, who can rewire, who can build a table base, and what the hell was Carlo thinking when he used that grout that looks like bubble gum, when he knew…There’s a line to cross when you’re putting together a house. You furnish to your liking and comfort. It’s done. Home. Guests will enjoy visiting in the big rooms overlooking the Val di Chiana. The kitchen cabinets are exactly the right cobalt blue. Cross the line and you’re in another realm. Coco and I long since passed into that golden zone. (“You must sweeten the house a little bit every day,” my sister once advised.) Does the ever-evolving desire for beauty at home derive from a super sense of conviviality? Coco often meets tourists in town while having coffee in the piazza. Soon, that Indian eyewear designer will be invited to lunch and will always remember the linens, the friendly chats, the fried zucchini flowers, the cold cucumber soup, and the peach tart. Coco’s long table, set with bowls of green hydrangeas, forms part of all the local expats’ summer memories, and in fall, the olive oil tasting on the night we’ve pressed our olives, big cheer, big wines, and chestnuts in the coals. But let’s not even pretend the obsession is all about welcoming friends. We would be hounding the antiques markets even if no guest ever came. We’ll always wander into the study at midnight and start rearranging the bookcase, if not rearranging the furniture. We are engaged in a long personal dialogue with four walls. How to tweak this room to make it interest me more, how to go to the next level with colors now that the dead pine no longer blocks the light? Enlarge the small bathroom, recover the faded chairs, replace, repaint, replant. It’s constant, this outer manifestation of an inner drive. From the precipitous hillside, way in the distance, the lights of the train whether you are there or not slip across the landscape, bringing someone near, taking someone away.