Dream Home I think I’m such a hardened cynic, certain nothing will surprise a tough
cookie like myself. My first glimmer of political awareness flickered on during
Watergate, illuminating nothing but big lies, so I don’t believe a thing a
politician says. When my boyfriend slept with my best friend when I was in the
hospital, I stopped believing in love at first sight. And ever since an editor
at a major national magazine told me, in an attempt to inspire my rewrite on an
article about lipstick, that “Journalism is good fiction,” I never believe
anything I read. I wouldn’t say I’m as far over the edge as a friend of
Richard’s who firmly believes that the whole space program, including the moon
walk, took place on a sound stage in Hollywood and that Ronald Reagan
orchestrated the Tate/La Bianca murders, but my skepticism is as thick as
bullet-proof Plexiglas. No one will fool me; my eyes are wide open.
Then what do you know, somebody pitched a big soggy wad of reality in my
wide-eyed face and knocked my last conviction right out my ears. I always
thought photographs couldn’t lie, especially the shots of the alluring homes
spread across the glossy pages of House Beautiful, Martha Stewart Living,
andMetropolitan Home. Especially Metropolitan Home. When we were
designing and building our house, I stared at the pages of my Met Homes like
they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, full of implicit truths, divine design answers,
or at the least, honest decoration. Last weekend I had the privilege to visit
one of the houses I most admired, a breezy abode made from a huge steel
building recycled from a cement factory in San Antonio. This house has won all
kinds of awards. It’s been in dozens of magazines. Lady Bird Johnson visited it
to get ideas for the Wildflower Research Center. I stole from its design freely
when we built our house — concrete floors, a tall steel porch, separate living
pods, and breezeways.
The house, in reality, was everything I’d imagined: stunning yet simple,
elegant yet livable. The photographs praising the structure didn’t lie. But
then the owner, Henry, began to tell us what it was like to have the crew from
Metropolitan Home photograph his house. “I almost had to throw them out,” said
Henry. The stylist arrived with a huge truck loaded with Mediterranean
furniture, knickknacks from the Homestead in Fredricksburg, and stacks of
artworks the magazine felt were “expected in a home in Texas.” Henry watched
his furniture shoved out the door, and big harvest tables and red leather
chairs shoved in. He kept his cool until they started taking down his art.
Henry is no collector of big-eyed dogs and clowns on velvet. He has a very
sophisticated and varied collection of paintings, etchings, and lithographs by
well-known and emerging artists. “I told ’em, `I don’t care if you move out all
my furniture. I don’t care if you fill my countertops with chopped vegetables.
I don’t care if you want to light a fire in the fireplace in the middle of
August. But you don’t touch the art,'” Henry said. Henry is about 90-feet tall
and owns a machete, so they listened. But they fiddled with everything else.
I was shattered. I had been aspiring to an illusion, a sham. What other
“lifestyle” lies do these magazine perpetuate? Is that not really the
homeowners’ terriers in this picture? Does this couple really live with white
slip covers and two toddlers? And who the hell really has buckets of hydrangeas
scattered throughout the living room and a first-edition Hemingway opened on
the sofa? Not me, not anyone, not anymore.
This article appears in August 16 • 1996 and August 16 • 1996 (Cover).