There's Something in the House

A meditation on the things that make a house more than just a house.

I recently spent a weekend in Newport, Rhode Island at my aunt and uncle’s beach cottage. There’s a bed on the front porch, white painted floors, and a mirror above the stove in the kitchen, which I find utterly delightful for its impracticality. But, maybe it’s just me who makes a mess of splattered oil every time I put something in a hot pan, and the mirror looks great.

While we were there, a robin made the kitchen window planter box her home and much to our delight, laid three shockingly blue eggs right there. I can’t blame the robin. It’s a wonderful house with a playful energy, an air of genuine comfort. It’s the beach, it’s lazing about with sandy feet, it’s a gift to be able to stay there. 

In Newport though, the house that always looms largest in my thoughts is my great-grandmother’s, Beaulieu. It is the backdrop of my fondest memories from the earliest ones I have up until the last summer I spent there, when I was 21 years old. I don’t even know what I’m doing trying to write about it here in so little time and so little space. I could start writing now and keep going forever, years and years, pages and pages. 

The house is a cottage of the gilded age variety, not the beach variety, and it is visually spectacular. This detail is not irrelevant to the feeling of being there. Particularly as children, the slightly-worn-down-in-some-places grandeur made us (my cousins and me) feel like we were living in a fairy tale. We scurried through secret doors that blended in with the wall paneling, time traveled on the rickety wooden swing in the backyard, and imagined ghosts in the dark back corner of the basement. We later discovered that what was actually back there was the wine cellar, which was a fairytale of its own in our teenage years. We pushed twin beds together and piled in, sticky from the beach and hot from our sunburns. We snuck out, and snuck back in, and watched the sun rise from the roof.

It was magical, and so many things contributed to that magic, it’s hard to pinpoint a clear source. How can I answer the question that always comes to mind when I think about Beaulieu? What makes a house more than just a house? Whether you want to call it soul, spirit, personality or anything else, where does the little something extra come from?

There’s the actual structure, of course, the architecture of the house. No one could visit Beaulieu and not be impressed in that regard. There’s the history—in this case, personal family history and the history the previous owners left behind. There are also the people who are inside the house with you. Though I grew up spending lots of time with my aunts, uncles and cousins in lots of different places (and other magical houses too), I directly attribute our uncommon closeness to the summers we spent in Newport under the roof of Beaulieu and under the fabulous wing of our shared great-grandmother. 

I suppose that’s the answer in this particular case. This house was not just a house because, for me, the soul of my relationship with my great grandmother resided there, and in at least a small way, still does. In August of 2019 when I drove away from the house, I cried so hard I could barely see the road. It was clear, almost as if the house had whispered it to me on the way out, that the chapter of my life that took place in that house was over. The chapter of my life that had my great-grandmother in it was over. They were the same thing. When she died three months later, I had already shed most of my tears. 

---

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my little brother’s graduation in Christchurch, Virginia and my family stayed at another grand and storied house. Built in the 1760’s, and recently restored to a glorious state, Wilton House is an incredible plantation home turned Vrbo rental. As we approached up the drive, I felt the awe that old buildings inspire, the tingle of my own impermanence. Thus, Wilton also set me off thinking about how houses take on meaning, and in this case, the number one ingredient was time.

Our second night there, as we sat around the dining room table talking about the house—it’s age and history—someone wondered if there were ghosts. I replied with certainty that there were not. It felt quite clear to me that, though I could sense the piled up years under the floorboards, there was no deeper spiritual life to the house. It wasn’t bad, it was just clean and quiet. Kathryn, who can sense these things, agreed with me. She even ventured that an exorcism must have taken place at some point.

I agreed with her at the time, but upon reflection, I’ve landed on an alternative to that priest with cross and holy water vision. There was simply no stuff. Of course, this is partly due to the function of the house. No one lives there, so aside from sparse furniture and some very nice oil paintings, it sits essentially empty. In the absence of the physical body, the stuff in a house takes on little pieces of the inhabitants’ soul. With no inhabitants, and no stuff, where can the soul possibly go? 

---

For me, in my own houses—dorm rooms and apartments count as houses in the abstract—the little something extra has always been in the stuff. In fact, I’m obsessed with the stuff. I hold on to beer caps from specific parties, lottery tickets that mark third dates, wristbands from concerts, and wine corks from birthdays. If I can attach meaning to it, it has a place in my house.

Before you judge, my obsession with stuff is part of my genetic inheritance. My father is a self-proclaimed pack rat, and my mother is in proud(ish) possession of more than one storage unit. How could I not be predisposed to the collection of stuff? I have a hereditary tendency towards pre-nostalgia. On the nurture side though, my parents’ habits meant that I also grew up around the stuff. The ceramic banana my mom made in middle school and the literal bookshelf full of my dad’s scrapbooks.

I learned from a young age that part of what makes a house more than a house is the feeling that it’s been lived in. Things have happened to the people who live there, both inside and outside the walls of the house. The easiest way to create this feeling is the collection of stuff. Fill a room with cards, and rocks, and matchbooks, and little glass bees and ladybugs, and the meaning contained in those little bits (the soul!) will float through the air and seep into the walls.

You may be wondering—Eve, if you really have as much stuff as you say, how do you fit it all in your New York City apartment? For starters, one of my mom’s storage units has a corner for me (thanks, Mama). More than that, though, being committed to the accumulation of stuff such as I am amounts to an aesthetic choice. I can’t stomach the beige interior design trends so prevalent in recent years, and Marie Kondo would end up in the hospital if she came toe to toe with me.

In my room you will not find smooth white walls or a bedside table with just a jug of water on a coaster. Instead, there's joyful clutter everywhere. Scraps of paper, shells from a beach walk two years ago, Christmas decorations, dead flowers, plastic beaded necklaces and googly eyes. When I’m in my house, I feel like I’m in the treasure trove of human things from The Little Mermaid, but instead of wondering where all of it came from, I know. I was there, and I brought the stuff back with me!

So, Marie Kondo would end up in the hospital, but she doesn’t have to worry about it because I’ll never call her. I am a stuff person, and I have it on the authority of every single person who has walked into my room, and said “this is so…you,” that being a stuff person has it’s upsides. It is what makes my house more than just a house.

When I move apartments in the fall (dread), and the sheer amount of stuff tucked in corners, behind books on the shelf, under the bed, becomes impossible to ignore, I will not be available for comment.

---

I am not the first person to write about the way that houses take on souls, spirits, personalities. While writing this, I started thinking about how in some books, the house is a character. For your consideration, here is a completely random list of books like that. I saw them sitting on my bookshelf, or they otherwise popped into my head.

Cloud Street by Tim Winton

Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
(read my review here)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(read my review here)

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
(read my review here)