I will always remember the very first time I saw my daughter’s living quarters when she was a grad student at an East Coast university.
The ivy-clad, graceful Gothic buildings and the tree-filled campus were almost too picture-perfect.
But, she did not live on campus.
Many of the master’s and doctoral degree candidates were billeted in a camp of barracks. Yes, barracks — rows and rows of pale greenish boxcar-type buildings, each with four units that had a few steps leading up to a stoop and entrance.
Inside that doorway, Frank Sinatra backed by Antonio Carlos Jobim sang out in my honor. A bunch of yellow daffodils sent out a bright welcome and I could sense a burning candle somewhere in that long, skinny room.
Attending this particular university under her own steam via a competitive fellowship that funded her studies and included a small stipend, Michelle, like her fellow scholars, lived frugally.
But, not without joy nor without some of the essentials of life: music, a few blossoms, a little candlelight. Undoubtedly, some cookies as well.
I was, quite simply, awed.
I couldn’t figure out what it was about this place that made me feel comfortable even before I got much beyond the doorway. And, at that moment, I didn’t quite understand why I was thinking, “This is what I want.”
It certainly wasn’t the furnishings that turned on these emotional antennae.
There was a big brown and cream striped sofa, bequeathed to her by her adviser in the fine tradition of professors who passed along their weary possessions when they acquired a new piece of furniture.
And, in the midst of these things with their eclectic ambience, there stood my child, beaming.
In that momentary vignette, I first realized the meaning of haven. A place of pride, a place that reflected the person who called it home — in her case, sensual pleasures of flickering light and subtle fragrance from a candle, fresh garden flowers, music, books, the beginnings of an art collection, along with an alchemist’s mix of order and very casual comfort.
Though her life was filled with the unnerving pace of research, classes and writing, she had a retreat, a place to think, to collect what she wanted, to cook, to dance, to be alone or with friends, to do whatever and whenever she wanted.
I knew right then that this is what I had to have in my life: a place to be me.
It was just a few years later that I stepped into my very own first apartment. One evening, as I closed the door behind me, I sighed. I then realized that I was home. I had my own retreat. My first solitary place of peace. My very own haven.
The walls, the furnishings had little to do with my feelings.
This was shortly after I chose to end a marriage of nearly 30 years, hurriedly hunted for a rental apartment, moved and started again at getting on with my life and work.
In those initial weeks, I became accustomed to looking across the street at another apartment building. Not inspiring.
But, my apartment had bay windows and a look to the east gave me a view of a slice of Lake Michigan and with it, views, too, of frisky canines and runners, sunrises, roiling or calm waters.
A look to the west revealed the Chicago sprawl, flat and far-reaching, glimpses of unbelievably glorious sunsets or darkening skies forecasting storms, twinkling night lights to the horizon. The water and the city. The sun, moon and stars. Haven . . . or heaven?
I loved everything about this place.
But this was not and would never be Architectural Digest. This was not about where the walls were or how the furniture lined up.
No matter.
It was about some sort of mystical mix of personally precious tangible things, of silence when I needed that, merry entertaining when I wanted that, comfort and peace — always.
Sounds silly, but this apartment became akin to a best friend — there for me.
This place, this home, this haven was where I could find me. And be me.
So, exactly what is it that makes a haven?
Mine is not yours and I may not understand why yours is yours.
That’s the point. A personal haven, a retreat or a sanctuary is such an individual matter that it may be indefinable, amorphous.
The spirit of Mexico
Carmen Munoz describes the home that she and her husband Cesar have created for their family on Chicago’s South Side as “very simple, very clean and very organized” because that is one part of their trying “to keep our home Mexican in philosophy and spirit.”
They love Chicago, assures Carmen, praising it as “a very beautiful city, home to our children, the place where we want them to grow.” But, keeping this kinship with the spirit of Mexico is something they want as instilled in Cesar Deniel, 12, Ana Isabel, 6, and Carlos Andres, 5, as it is in them.
In the world outside their home, they are Chicagoans.
It is at home that they preserve and honor their roots.
“We always speak Spanish at home,” she adds, “the children, too, even though they speak in English very well, with no accent.”
Cesar brings with him the tradition of turning simple things into special things — like bleaching then decorating boxes from fruits or vegetables. They always keep one candle burning while they’re home, just as they did in Mexico; they care about the placement, too, “of ornaments, of curios” they brought with them.
An idiosyncratic vision
Chicago architect Doug Garofalo says some people have “an idiosyncratic” vision of what makes a place in their home special, personal, sacred.
“A well-placed window or a skylight that creates a quality of light can be an impetus to slowing down — and reflecting,” he says.
For Garofalo and his wife, that “idiosyncratic” haven is a big table covered with books, sketchpads, comfort things. “We live in a compact area with an open plan yet this table in relation to the room offers an escape. It’s as simple as that for us. To be in the vicinity of books, to stare out the window. That’s enough.”
Known for re-making homes and creating new residential and public buildings with a very contemporary presence, Garofalo says “there’s always a place that can be your spot. It doesn’t have to be a room or a whole house.”
But, why the need, the desire for a spot or a room or a house in the first place?
“It’s hard to negotiate out there,” he says, referring to our outside worlds of work and play. “Everything is fast. We need a place to pause from everyday routines that can be just too fast, a place to escape or be alone,” he adds.
He says the owner of one of the first houses he designed asked for an addition atop the house “that was almost like a crow’s nest. He had a chair in there and it was his place to slow down, contemplate the world — and smoke a good cigar.”
Client Andrew Markow wanted Garofalo to transform his family’s tiny suburban 1950s house into a free-form contemporary home with an additional floor and lots of windows. The finished home was so remarkable in its transformation, it was featured in an exhibit in the Architecture Galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Part of the top floor addition was to be Markow’s home office. He wanted his desk to face the trees. “It turned out to be more than an office. It was his kind of treehouse,” says Garofalo, “a place where he escapes.”
Architecture is psychology
Architect Dan Sutherland, who has been designing and building homes in Chicago and along the North Shore since the 1970s, says he spends huge amounts of time with clients to “know who they are and what they’re comfortable with.” Everything from their furnishings in their current homes to their clothes and how they spend their time are studied “to get to the core of who they are,” the most essential factor in building the kind of home that, if you will, fits them like a skin. “Most of architecture is psychology,” he muses.
Yet, there seems to be a common thread in what people want in their homes, one of those intangibles that people rarely put into words.
The home that might be described as sanctuary, haven, refuge is “the space where people go to achieve their own inner balance.”
“If they are in a social environment all day, it is a place to be alone. If energy is outgoing all day — teaching, training, being on — then the home or haven must offer incoming energy, a place to read, to meditate.”
Writer and consultant Paula Hardin has always considered her home as sanctuary, but “always as spiritual sanctuary, never as just a place to feel physically secure.”
Some years ago, Hardin had sort of a vague feeling that she wanted a place away from her hectic life in the city, “though I could not give up the city. I love it.”
Shedding an unnecessary coat
From the first time she saw Tryon Farm, an environmentally friendly community just outside Michigan City, Ind., she “fell in love with it.”
Tryon is a highly unusual settlement that clusters homes in small groups, perhaps 10 or so, with each having views of either forest or fields of grass.
Hardin says when she drives in from her Chicago condo, as she turns into Tryon Lane, “I feel I am taking off a heavy, unnecessary coat. This big sigh comes out as I feel myself changing, knowing this is the one place I can shift gears and access a part of myself that I cannot reach in the city.”
She chose her site and the particular home plan so that she could look into the woods from a spacious screened porch. “My meditation is staring, watching trees moving, and learning to listen, finding out who I am again. The meadow comes right up to my porch. Nature is all around me.”
She describes Tryon as a place of silence, solitude and darkness.
Her home is uncluttered. “I have no pictures on the walls, no draperies. The architect is a Zen master of space and light. I need both in my life.”
Capturing a piece of outdoors
Kris Matz lives in a similar city/country realm. She heads to the city on weekends for “the contrast in lifestyles, the diversity.” Her city condo, near Michigan Avenue, gives her views “where you can see forever.”
Long Grove, she says, “is peaceful, but boring” for full-time living.
Yet, “It is my favorite place in the whole world,” she claims.
“My home there was built in the `60s as a summer house on a golf course. Long Grove was country, not suburbia. It was all green open areas,” Matz says of the territory that is now hers.
“I like to be outdoors and I wanted to create a space that was like being totally outdoors — but that would have no bugs.” Matz, a licensed architect who now helps operate a family business, says, “The moment I conceived this space, I called it my sanctuary.”
It’s an addition barely visible to neighbors or traffic, that’s screened but appears to have no ceiling, has sliding glass doors and “I am in it from March through November. I even sleep there. I can literally sit there for hours and read, study the Bible, think.”
However, Matz says her cats, “Fearless and Ruth, think I designed it for them.”
Small, safe, historic
Carole and Stewart Saunders weren’t searching specifically for sanctuary, safe haven or sacred place when they came into Chicago looking for a home. Yet, their choice in Old Town was, surprisingly and quite literally, a former place of worship.
About eight years ago, this empty-nester couple — he’s a stockbroker, she’s a teacher — felt the time had come to move.
“My parameters were few,” says Carole. “Small. In a location that was safe, comfortable, historic.”
They found that and more, behind a brick wall, on one of their first forays into Old Town.
The 1,500-square-foot home they bought was built in 1932 as the Assyrian Church of the East and was called “the tiniest cathedral in the world,” according to its history. It’s been renovated and updated through the years though it has its original flagstone floor in the living/dining areas. There’s a galley kitchen, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and, of the 18-foot beamed ceiling, Carole says, “I can boast that I truly have cathedral ceilings.”
She says she and Stew feel “blessed. The house is behind a brick wall. It is private, quiet. Weekends are so special. We can walk to the beach or park, enjoy the patio. The fact that our home was a church is outstanding to us. It is where we renew ourselves.”
A dedicated meditation space
During the years he practiced, physician and psychoanalyst Gordon Fuqua says he “had a vision of being a hermit in some remote area” so that he could better practice a spiritual life.
“But that’s not my life. I am in this life.”
He surprised himself, he says, that he had “the courage to retire and pursue a spiritual practice” right here at his home in Chicago.
With their two daughters out of college and on their own, Fuqua and his wife, Paula, also a psychoanalyst, lived in temporary quarters while their Lincoln Park condo was being totally revamped.
For Fuqua, the most significant change is the transformation of a small bedroom into a meditation room. That came about because, to him, “sanctuary encompasses a physical place that is set aside for grounding, meditation, centering on spirituality.
“I’ve always been attracted to the design of Japanese tea gardens and I’ve tried to do that with this room. It is very simple and very quiet. It has wood flooring. There is a Japanese chest, a brass bowl from Tibet. There is no longer a closet. A cutout in the wall holds a Buddha that Fuqua describes simply as “lovely,” with “qualities of serenity.”
He says, “This is where I feel most resonant with Buddhism. This is a peaceful place, a dedicated meditation space.
“It has no other use.”
