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On Homes, Spas, and Baths:
August 19, 2002:
Like most married folks, my wife and I have a home. The main difference
in our home is that we designed it and built it ourselves. Usually,
when I say that I get what I consider a strange reaction. People
will ask who did the work for me or who the contractor was. Then
I must say, "No. You don't understand. We did the work. We
mixed the mortar and laid the bricks and blocks. We sawed the
studs and nailed them together. We nailed down the shingles and
we installed the windows." I suspect many people simply don't
believe that, even after I make it clear.
The truth is we did. It's a very nice home, but building it was very hard work and very frustrating for many reasons. Shortage of ready cash was just one of them. Living in an unfinished house was another. Suffice it to say, I would never do that again. Since then, I have learned a great deal. I still like to build things and I do, but I limit the scope of the project to something I can manage in a season.
Now, even though I love our home and would not willingly leave it, I sometimes think about how my own ideas have changed. I think my home would be very different if I designed it now. Not only have my needs changed, but my understanding of what is important has evolved. This is my idea of how a civilized home would be. It is not so much about layout and design. It is more about the functions of the home. This is not a home for herd people or couch potatoes. It's a home for vital, living people.
One of the things I would completely reconsider is the nature, layout, and function of the bath. How we think of the bath is, I believe, a basic error of Western culture. The place we call the bathroom in most homes is only a bathroom by default. It's real function is to dispose of human waste. In earlier times, this was something we did outside, not in our home. Then, in a frenzy of modern convenience seeking, we brought the outhouse into the house and put it in the bath. I consider that to be a dumb move. Bringing it inside was okay. Putting it in the bath was wrong.
I did a bit of research into baths and discovered the Romans had a better idea. For them, bathing was a communal activity and the bath was a place for social intercourse. Most of the Roman baths, especially the larger ones, were public facilities. In function they could be compared to what we now call spas or athletic clubs. The Romans built baths wherever they went. Some of the most famous were built at Bath England in the first Century AD. These have now become tourist attractions.
To be sure, the Romans also had toilets. In fact, they had history's first flush toilets. These were similar to the toilets on an American troop ship. Yes, I was there. These consist of a large bore pipe with water running though it. Seats are mounted over holes in the pipe. Of course, the Roman versions were made of marble. The point is, they did not put these things in the bathrooms. They were in separate rooms with one single purpose. In my ideal home, that is how it would be. The latrines would be in separate rooms near the bath. They would have only the toilet, bidet, and washbasin.
I suspect most of the reasoning behind a toilet being in the bath has to do with economy. Most homes I have seen are laid out to minimize plumbing. Kitchens, bathrooms, and laundries tend to be clustered. That is logical, but I have often suspected another undercurrent of motive. I wonder if the old skin/sin syndrom is still lurking beneath the surface of our puritan Western mentality.
It is a classic of puritan silliness wherein skin, hence bathing, becomes associated with sin and finally with feces. With that reasoning we can put the spa and the toilet in the same secret room where, by all the fundamentalist puritan standards, they belong. In my thinking, nudity is not a big deal. It is definitely not a sin and it need not be titillating. For the bath, it is a natural state. For the dinning room or the theater, it is not.
Puritans notwithstanding, in my ideal home the bath would be more that a bath. It would become the center of activity. What we put in the bath is a matter of personal choice. I would insist on a heated spa big enough for four people. We used to call these whirlpools. There must also be showers and tubs for those who prefer them. In addition, I would have a sauna in a smaller attached room. Some would probably prefer a steam room. The difference is that a sauna is dry heat and a steam room is wet heat.
Now my bath would not be some dinky afterthought room. In fact, I would not call it a bath. I would call it the social activities room. In that, it would combine several functions. Besides being the bath, it would also be my greenhouse. It would be a place of growing things. When I designed our home, I included what I thought was a rather large greenhouse. Now I find it is too small. As part of the social activities room it would command more space. This activities room should be a very large greenhouse like room with a southern exposure. This assumes the northern hemisphere, of course.
Another feature of this social activities room would be a lot of windows. This lets in light and also gives a view of the outdoors and the growing things out there. Yes, I very much like growing things. In fact, I'm not very interested in the problems of people who do not like gardens and flowers and greenhouses with live growing things.
In my plan the dining area is also within this room. To be sure, I would also want a fireplace on one interior wall of this room. Thus, we bath, dine, converse, and grow things in our social activities room. Other rooms which open onto and are associated with this main room are the kitchen, latrines, and sauna. So the activities room is a very large greenhouse like room surrounded on three sides by the other rooms of the house.
A separate place for meditation is a must for me. There must be a peaceful, and pretty place to meditate. This may be just a smaller greenhouse type room off of the main room. It must have a door. Meditation is a private quiet activity. The room should be dedicated to that and nothing else. It should have plenty of light for growing things or an outside view of a garden. It should be airy and bright. It need not be large.
What other rooms? I know my wife would want some kind of a studio for painting and such. I, for sure, would need a fair sized office. Both of these rooms should be handy to, but separate from, the activities room. For us, television is not central to our lives. For me, it's useful for keeping current on the news. So a TV set in a corner, near the fireplace, would suffice. It's not a big deal. Finally, there must be a shop or hobby area. That could be in a basement or even a garage. It's important, but not central.
The only other things we need are bedrooms. This is another area where I think we are off the track. I think we could avoid a great number of our winter ailments if we slept outside. Stay with me on this. What I mean by that is that a bedroom should be unheated and be open to outside air. The room need not be exposed to rain and snow to do this. It could have a large screened window to let the air in. Clearly, to do that, the room must be separated and insulated from the rest of the house.
Now, to keep from freezing to death, we would need electric blankets and mattresses for local heat. We should also be able to close the window on those blistering hot days and invoke a little air conditioning. I would also make the bedroom a two room affair. There would be a separate heated dressing room with a closet and a door opening to the bedroom. The bedroom would be just that; a room big enough to hold a bed.
Not really part of the house proper, is the porch. I feel that a huge screened porch is a must. With that, a hanging porch swing would be nice. The door from the porch to the yard would be a simple screen door. To complete this picture of nostalgia, the screen door must squeak and slam when you let go of it. Can you hear grandma shouting, "Don't let that door slam!" Then the loud squeak and the bang!
That is the house I would build if I were starting over today.
Houses, the way they are now are designed for lazy couch potatoes.
For active, dynamic, thinking people, they are inconvenient. The
central ideas of my house are activities and social intercourse.
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