In All Things, Art
I GREW UP IN SUBURBAN HOUSES of no particular pedigree—housing, really, not architecture, certainly not art. My parents were buying a roof and just enough room, “a decent yard.” Maybe they would spring for new carpeting, or wallpaper for the dining room. Then, we lived there, with no further thought to interior design or collections. My first encounter with the old-house mystique was when, in first grade in New Jersey, I met Barbara and started going over to her house. It was a colonial-era Dutch house; Barbara’s grandmother, the town librarian, proudly told me it dated to 1693. (The center room did, the one that was always cold. Most of the house was ca. 1710, the kitchen wing built perhaps a hundred years later.) For me, it was love at…
