Is it your dream one day to move up to one of those big, impressive houses with expansive grounds, imposing facade and enough rooms to hold weekend house parties? A house big enough to tango in without moving the furniture?
As one who grew up in a number of such monster manses and now abides in one of 13 rooms, let me offer this advice:
Psychiatrists can treat you for dreams.
To put it another way, big houses are for the very rich or the very crazy. And they quickly can make the one into the other.
Consider those expansive grounds. We all dream of our own private Versailles, forgetting that Louis XIV employed thousands of workers to keep that big dump up-and so bankrupted the French treasury in the process that his successors were compelled to levy taxes so huge they brought on the French Revolution.
My family was certainly far from very rich (I won`t say anything about very crazy), but this was no impediment to our succumbing to the Versailles syndrome. Our first big house was the old (former Illinois Gov.) Dwight Green place in Long Beach, Ind. Its grounds were so expansive that there are now three other houses on what was once its front lawn.
In those days there were only large, stately oak trees on those grounds, each of them producing vast quantities of something you never think about while sitting there in the real estate agent`s office: leaves, great, mucky, enormous layers of totally useless leaves that required a full millennium to biodegrade.
We did not have thousands of French gardeners. We had only myself and my two brothers. Consequently, while friends with less impressive lawns were off playing football or messing with girls, we spent our afternoons laboring like medieval peasants. I still hate rakes.
Our bonfires smoldered continuously from early October to Thanksgiving. We went to school smelling vaguely like Virginia hams.
Nowadays, of course, burning leaves is a serious felony-punishable, I think, by having to rake leaves on a prison farm.
Into the woods
My family`s next big house was in Cross River, N.Y., and it occupied 36 acres, of which only 28 acres were devoted to trees. As these woods were at some remove from the main house, their annual tonnage of leaf product was ignored, much as the federal deficit is now ignored. I think they still are rotting away in piles six feet deep.
What we could not ignore were the eight acres of lawn, which was mowed once a month (whether it needed it or not) by a Barbary Coast pirate with a riding tractor about the size of a combine. An acre, may I remind you, is the exact size of a football field.
As you`ll note in slick magazines such as HG and Town & Country, formal gardens are considered de rigueur for big houses. That`s rigueur, as in
”rigor.” Professional gardeners should be considered de rigueur also. For all her gardening books, you don`t see socialite C.Z. Guest with much dirt under her fingernails.
Big houses also come with long driveways. Each of my family`s houses had two long driveways: One of them, the front drive of a house we had in Bedford, N.Y., was a tenth of a mile long.
That sounds like the merest of fractions, until you consider snow. We came to consider it the way the coolies building the Burma Road came to consider rocks.
Worse than snow was rain, which created enormous potholes, cut deep ruts and gullies and washed away gravel as though it was made of Styrofoam.
Worse than all of that was our milkman, who on nights and weekends raced stock cars. On weekdays he raced his milk truck, finding our front drive perfect for drag race practice. One morning he drove over one of our cats. On another he skidded into a ravine.
Driveways can be paved, of course. It`s a quick way to discover why corrupt contractors pay such big bribes to get city paving contracts.
Fenced in
Expansive grounds require extensive fences. According to an old New England saying, ”Good fences make good neighbors.” They also make impoverished ones. Those quaint split-rail fences can cost more than Abraham Lincoln made in his lifetime. And if you have to replace a rail, you`ll find your local hardware store doesn`t stock them.
Picket fences have to be repainted. It can`t be done with rollers or spray cans. Picket-fence painting would be an effective means of compelling prisoners-of-war to make confessions, except I think it`s banned by the Geneva Convention.
The swimming pool is often considered a necessary adjunct to a big house. The one at our Cross River house was used mostly to collect leaves, whether we wanted to or not. The one at my parents` big house in Florida was used mostly to keep them from being lonely. No fewer than three different kinds of pool servicemen used to visit it almost daily.
Modern big houses come with three- and four-car garages that are supposed to impress people with the number of vehicles one owns (actually, it is those with single-lane driveways and mere carports who most impress people with the number of cars they own). If you have only two or three cars for that big garage, you`re going to find that all that extra space simply will confront you with the truth of an old maxim: Junk collects in proportion to the space available to collect it in. The bigger the garage, the more your place is going to look like a waterfront warehouse.
Older big houses, however, tend to have old-fashioned one- and two-car garages. The one at our Long Beach, Ind., home, built in the 1920s, barely accommodated a lone 1949 Cadillac, especially with all the rakes we kept in there.
Nowadays, big houses tend to be built on comparatively tiny plots of land, even, and perhaps especially, in pricey communities such as Oak Brook and Beverly Hills. Here in McLean, there`s a development of 15- and 20-room houses set no more than 50 feet apart, rather like the barracks at Ft. Bragg. The effect is akin to having Queen Elizabeth dolled up in coronation garb while riding in a Volkswagen Cabriolet.
But there are still the interiors to contend with. Historically, big houses were necessary to accommodate all the servants required to keep them up. Nowadays there are no servants but the occasional housekeeper, and these spend much of their time keeping track of your children or filling out immigration forms.
The servants of yore, of course, have been replaced by labor-saving devices, such as food processors and wall vacuum units. Unfortunately, there are no labor-saving devices that wash food processor parts or clean out wall vacuum cleaner ducts.
Despite all the advances of civilization, there are no labor-saving devices that wash windows. The only time I`ve ever lived in a place with truly clean windows was when I lived in a relatively small city apartment.
Old-fashioned big houses at least had the convenience of single-pane windows, which could do nothing more complicated than break or get dirty. Nowadays, many houses come with double-paned insulated windows, which seal out cold and heat. After a few years, however, they develop leaks and admit moisture between the panes. This condenses, leaving opaque stains. Mine now need replacing, and I have 20 windows, seven of them picture windows.
Space race
People who buy big houses because they think they need the space are often amazed to discover they still don`t have enough, no matter how many rooms they have. This is because the maxim affecting garages also applies to the interior of houses. Junk expands to exceed available space.
My wife and I each have our own study because we both do a lot of work at home. But because there is space for it, our work and requisite materials have expanded. Her stuff has spilled out into the front hall. Mine has overflowed into the party room (computer discs on the wet bar, etc.), where it is about to collide with the overflow from the kids` Nintendo room, which used to be my billiard room.
An advantage of so much space is that individual family members can go off and be by themselves, as in Virginia Woolf`s ”a room of one`s own.”
This is particularly advantageous when one`s family includes a 12- and a 9-year-old, as does mine, and both are the sort who think of Bon Jovi as classical music.
Lost souls
The disadvantage is that, at any given moment, you don`t know where anyone is. Family members wander through the house calling to each other like Grimm Brothers` fairy tale characters lost in the forest. When they do make verbal contact, conversations are conducted at the same decibel level as they are on sailing ships during Nor`easters.
I recall once touring the ultimate in American monster manses, the great Biltmore house, which sits on a leveled-off mountaintop near Asheville, N.C., and which, at 250 rooms, is the largest house in the country.
Not far into the tour, I was separated from my wife and children, I think while dallying too long in the house`s billiard room, which I was admiring for its lack of Nintendo games. It took me nearly an hour to find them again.
Worse than misplacing your family members is having to heat them. All that space can turn frigid very quickly, and yet take hours to heat up again- hours, and dollars. The folly of thinking they really could afford a big house came home to my parents their very first winter in the big house in Bedford, when they got a heating oil bill for nearly $200.
That was in 1954, when gasoline cost a dime a gallon. Many of our friends simply closed off sections of their houses in the winter, letting them chill like Dr. Zhivago`s, while making do with the remaining, smaller quarters, just like normal people.
Worse, with a three-level house, it`s almost impossible to keep it heated, or cooled, uniformly. You`ll be content to wear skivvies in one room but be wanting a parka in another on a different floor.
The modern-day heat pump is a help, but a fiendishly expensive one to install-and repair.
If you can lay hands on a repairman, that is, and they can be as exclusive and elusive as brain surgeons. Indeed, one commonplace of all big houses is a large address-telephone book filled with the names and numbers of the wide and varied assortment of fix-it fellows required to keep the place running-names and numbers that are as closely held as the codes to Swiss bank accounts. It took us about a dozen of these guys to find one who could figure out how to stop the clothes dryer ventilation duct from leaking through the ceiling of the party room.
A big mystery
I am reminded of another ”ultimate” big house, the extraordinary Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., once the residence of the widow of the heir to the Winchester arms fortune.
A fortune teller told her she would never die as long as building work continued on her home. Thereafter, an army of workmen were kept busy on her house day and night, until it had expanded to some 160 rooms and 40 stairways, most with 13 steps, many that led absolutely nowhere.
Mrs. Winchester expired anyway, with the hammering and sawing continuing to the last.
Anyone with a big house today can tell you what it`s like.
