The Dream House

Bradford, Vermont. William Morgan, photographer.

By Robert Boucheron, AIA

“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls. . .”—aria from The Bohemian Girl, 1843

In a dream that recurs with variations, I visit an apartment that I leased months or years before, and lived in briefly, but forgot about. Have I paid rent all this time? How could I be so extravagant? The apartment looks both strange and familiar. A window has been left open and the front door will not close properly. There are signs that someone else has entered and may still be about.

Instead of an apartment, it may be a house that I find myself in, one that is old and in disrepair. I have just moved in, and I am spending my first night, with no furniture, and little idea of where things are. Again, a window or door is open, admitting drafts and noises. I despair of sleeping in this house, and sometimes I wake up, in fact, from a bad dream.

In the course of my work as an architect, I often visit unoccupied houses and apartments, to sketch floor plans and take dimensions. To dream about these places is a small step from waking life.  Nevertheless, a house is an obvious symbol for a person’s way of life. In my dreams, I usually see the house from inside, corresponding to the way we see our own lives and our bodies. I understand the old house image well enough—I am in my fifties—but I don’t know what to make of the apartment. Does it represent a career I did not pursue, or an earlier phase of my life? Like all designers, I live vicariously in the places I draw and that helps to confuse matters.

For most people, the phrase “dream house” carries no negative weight. On the contrary, it conjures a fantasy of comfort, luxury, and size—a house that might suddenly appear by rubbing Aladdin’s magic lamp. In this sense, tinged with wistful irony, a man says that some day he will build his dream house. Books and magazines cater to this fantasy, collections of house designs, lavishly illustrated, sometimes with brightly colored descriptions to match.

An industry of “shelter magazines” testifies to the popularity of this domestic daydream.  Hanley Wood, for example, publishes American Dream Homes, which their website describes as an “annual showcase of our finest designs. . . the year’s most celebrated homes from the most accomplished designers. . . great photography and meticulous descriptions of the exquisite details.”

The photographs rarely include people, and certainly not the celebrity homeowners. That would disrupt the dream, in which the magazine reader imagines herself as the happy inhabitant. The text reinforces the subliminal message, inviting the reader on a tour, and implying that all this can be hers. The expense is rarely mentioned, partly because it is obvious, but more because the dream does away with practical concerns. You could win the lottery, or inherit a fortune. You could move in tomorrow!

This commercialized house fantasy has something in common with pornography. We speak of a sex industry, with nude dancing live on stage, and its related media. Perhaps we should acknowledge a similar wish fulfillment at work in magazines like Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and House Beautiful. Does it follow that the purveyors of dream houses are morally ambiguous?

There is nothing unclear about the drawings and photographs. The presentation of the home is utterly realistic, fanatically detailed, and loaded with adjectives. The granite countertop is polished, the fireplace mantel is veined marble, the ceramic tile is imported from Italy, and the wood floor is reclaimed oak from a demolished mill. The tone of the descriptions is overheated—a fever of materialism. Look closer and the lighting is too bright, the colors too intense, the glass too clear. In a word, the shadows are missing, just as the untidiness of life is missing. Where is the stray shoe, the carpet stain, the magazine left lying on the couch? The photographs, for all their apparent realism, have been carefully arranged, with hidden lights, and then skillfully edited, to remove the fallen leaf from the flowers and plants brought in as props.

All of this seems harmless, except that plenty of people have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. A diet of too many sweets is unhealthy, and a surfeit of dream houses leads to distress. You feel that your home, and by extension your life, is small, plain, and empty. Then there is the competitive spirit that seeps into every aspect of our lives, including the home as the most telling sign of social status.

Those who strike it rich can afford their dream house, and turn fantasy into reality. The process involves more than rubbing Aladdin’s lamp. Instead of a genie, they must deal with real estate agents, building inspectors, loan officers, home builders, and perhaps an architect. The dreamer encounters obstacles, and experiences frustration.  He asks “why can’t I have it all?” An architect friend of mine with years of experience in luxury houses said to me once that he finds it easier to design a resort hotel or an expensive vacation home than to draw a couple’s dream house. Client expectations are high—she wants to cram everything in, and he wants to meet a budget.

Somewhere in the process, perhaps after construction has started, the client receives a “reality check.”  This can take the form of a real estate appraisal lower than expected, or denial of a permit, or notice of a zoning violation, or a construction cost that is spiraling out of control.  The homeowner’s natural impulse is to blame anyone but himself.  The world is conspiring to thwart his dream.  All she wants is a beautiful place to live—is that too much to ask?

Still, they persevere, and if they have enough money, the result is there for all to see. Is it fair to call these houses vulgar? Nouveau-riche?  They can be interesting. In an essay called “Among the Ruins” about three twentieth-century writers, each of whom built a villa on Capri, Bruce Chatwin wrote: “Their houses were thus acts of self-love—‘dream houses’ where they hoped to live, love, and work wonders of creation.” For Chatwin, the villas reflect their patrons, exactly.

Taste is fickle, and what was derided as excessive when it was new is now called historic. In the United States, the years just before and after 1900 produced spectacular examples of residential luxury, houses which even today shape our definition of the dream house. Consider the mansions of Long Island, the “summer cottages” of Newport, and estates such as Biltmore, in North Carolina.

A number of recent books detail McKim, Mead and White’s houses and the culture of dream homes in the Gilded Age. The American Country House, by Clive Aslet (Yale, 1990, 2004) describes the economic and social forces that gave rise to the estates, as well as some prominent architects and their creations. The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, by Samuel G. White (Rizzoli, 1998) is a large-format book with color photographs that takes a project-based approach and Stanford White, Architect, by Elizabeth and Samuel White (Rizzoli, 2008) focuses on the residential guru of this famous firm. Triumvirate, by Mosette Broaderick (Knopf, 2010), just hit bookshelves and is, perhaps, the most synthetic in blending design, politics, and firm culture in his take on the context of these buildings.

Under the influence of European travel or education, architects have often designed the dream house in castle form. My favorite, from family vacations in the 1960s, is Boldt Castle, in the Thousand Islands, between New York State and Canada. George C. Boldt, the proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, began the main house in 1900. Constructed of granite, steel, and concrete, with a profusion of gables and turrets, it boasts six stories and 120 rooms. Building stopped on the death of his wife Louise in 1904. Never completed, the castle occupies an island reshaped in the form of a heart, to express the love of the married couple. It stood empty for 73 years, but was and is open in the summer months for tours.  Since 1977, some restoration work has been done. Is it kitsch, or is Boldt Castle the quintessential romantic ruin?

In central Virginia, we have the example of Swannanoa. Perched atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was built in 1913 by James H. and Sallie Mae Dooley. Major Dooley (1841-1924) was a Richmond lawyer who made a fortune in railroads after the Civil War. The childless couple occupied the house briefly.  In the years 1928-1932 it was a country club, with an 18-hole golf course. Then, it sat empty until 1949.  Designed by the architectural firm of Baskervill and Noland, and based on the Villa Medici in Rome, it fulfills all the material demands of the dream house, while maintaining an air of dreamy unreality. The Virginia Landmarks Register describes it aptly:

“The exterior of the house is faced entirely in Georgia white marble, while the interior is richly appointed with costly materials. The outstanding interior feature is the huge Tiffany stained glass window at the landing of the grand stair, depicting Mrs. Dooley in the gardens. Typical of the period, each of the principal rooms has its own architectural character, ranging from the Louis XVI music room to the Turkish office.  Completing the image of a Gilded Age estate is an Italian-style terraced garden.”

The American sculptor, painter, architect, organist, writer, and self-taught scientist Walter Russell leased Swannanoa in 1949, and lived there until his death in 1963. Russell wrote books on his unconventional theories, among which are his assertions that the mind of God produced all matter and energy and that “the universe is founded on the unifying principle of rhythmic balanced interchange.” He coined the term “New Age,” and created the University of Science and Philosophy, a home-study course headquartered in Swannanoa. His widow, Lao Russell, opened the house to tourists, and I saw it shortly before she died in 1988.

Crammed with Russell’s sculptures, paintings, and copies of his self-published books, available for purchase, the house clearly suffered from decades of neglect. Roof leaks, cracked plaster, peeling paint, and tattered drapes obscured the architectural treasures, as well as Russell’s reputation. Lao Russell, on the day I visited, held forth in the main living room to a throng of acolytes. Born and raised in England, under the name of Daisy Cook, she calmly predicted that the island of Great Britain would soon tilt up on its western coast in a geological catastrophe and slide beneath the North Sea, like a tea tray.

The Dooleys had earlier built a house for themselves in Richmond, Virginia, of rough stone with plenty of porches, turrets and chimneys. Maymont (1893) is often described as “opulent” and typical of the Gilded Age. It is now open to the public as a house museum, with extensive grounds overlooking the James River maintained as a park. Interiors include Mrs. Dooley’s bed in the shape of a white swan.

Although it was published earlier, in 1842, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” has a curious parallel to Swannanoa. It can even be read as a parody of the American mansion, with its eclectic style and over-decorated interiors. (Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, a Hudson valley mélange of Dutch and Italian influence, dates from 1837, and nearby Lyndhurst, a Gothic Revival mansion, from 1838.) Poe implies that the story is set in Europe, but gives no time or place. He describes a masked ball held in an “imperial suite” of seven rooms, each decorated in a different color, and “irregularly disposed,” rather than “a long and straight vista,” so as to produce “a novel effect.” Poe calls the house a “castellated abbey,” and mentions Gothic windows and stained glass. He dwells on the heedless luxury and “bizarre” taste of the owner, Prince Prospero, who in the end gets what he deserves, a dose of the plague.

With less moralizing, Poe reveals a similar attitude toward the rich and their houses in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” During a great storm, a “fissure” opens, “from the roof of the building in a zigzag direction, to the base.” By the light of the “full, setting, and blood-red moon,” the walls crumble and sink below the waters of the lake.

A different literary version of the dream house is found in St. Teresa of Avila’s book Interior Castle. A guide to meditation and mystical prayer, written in 1577, the book repeatedly uses the image of “crystal mansions” for the human soul, or the otherworldly “place” where the mind goes during a meditative trance. St. Teresa develops the image as a series of interlocking transparent houses or chambers, like glass boxes, through which the mind can roam. The image suggests the ice palaces erected in northern countries, as part of a winter festival. Built entirely of ice, in places like Minnesota and Russia, the palaces are open for tours, and brightly lit, sometimes in colors that recall Poe’s “imperial suite.”

It is unlikely that the architects of the Modern Movement had the Spanish saint in mind when they created the glass-walled house. Yet there it is, a perfect, crystalline box. Two iconic examples are the Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1945, and the house Philip Johnson built for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1949. Large sheets of glass became commonplace in commercial buildings, and the glass house became popular, especially in California, with architects such as Richard Neutra. To judge by current architectural magazines, glass has lost none of its appeal to contemporary designers. It has even gotten a boost from the “green building” movement, which favors sunlight, plain and planar surfaces, shiny metal and synthetic materials, and a mechanical precision akin to the computers that draw it.

At first glance, the glass house has nothing in common with the Gilded Age dream house or the McMansions that ape it. Where one is austere, the other is opulent. Where one is ethereal, the other is emphatically material. Yet the discussion in the press is the same, focused on details of construction, the exact materials used, the relation to the site—slope, water, sunlight, and garden—and, for lack of a better phrase, the aesthetic effect. If the role of fantasy is mentioned, it is only to dismiss it. The dreaminess of the dream house notwithstanding, we Americans want our houses to be as practical, solid, and grounded as we are.

For all that, a wall of glass plays with our perception. Glass denies that it has substance, and invites us to consider the idea instead of the structure. Detailing often conceals the edge, hides the gasket, and makes inside and outside appear identical. The idea comes at a price—contemporary design is notoriously more expensive than traditional, a fact that traditional architects love to point out. So we have come full circle. The glass house is the ultimate dream house and it is an expression of modern taste and economic clout.

It would be interesting to know what Poe would make of the transparent house, putting all its contents on display, including those who live in it. Perhaps he would dislike all that sunlight, health and absolute certainty. With his fondness for death, disease, and premature burial, he might see it as a glass coffin, or an exhibit showcase. The Crystal Palaces of London and New York came too late for him, so we can only speculate. (They were built in 1851 and 1853, and Poe died in 1849.) He would note that glass glares and reflects, creating doubles and illusions. He would see its dreamlike aspect and its fragility. In the end, ready with the proverb about people who live in glass houses, he would see it shatter, like a dream of wealth and human arrogance.

Robert Boucheron  is a Charlottesville architect and writer.