Clare Dudman, and weird houses I have stalked

Clare Dudman of Keeper of the Snails has an essay up at DWELL. It's about a single-person Norwegian dwelling called a Boxhome, which is, as the name suggest, a sort of home in a box--the box, however, being furnished with lots of natural light and wood paneling. I really enjoyed the essay: Clare has such a natural, unforced way of writing. Plus there's something fascinating about descriptions of this sort: how, I wonder, might one organize one's life around such a minimalist home? Clearly you can't have any children there: "to reach the bedroom," Clare writes, you have to "step across a gap between floors." Probably can't have a broken leg, either. But it gets me to thinking....

I ought to carry a camera more often. There are some houses around here that absolutely fascinate me. One is a concrete-looking structure, one floor, that looks about the size of a trailer, except that it's not a trailer. It's near the road--a sort of main road but not in a business area, so residential busy--but somehow so unremarkable that you don't notice it. I drove by it for years before I noticed it. It's utterly depressing looking. And yet, I'm dying to know what it's like in there. It's so unlike any other house I've seen around here.

And then there's a house that's across from my old high school. I've been fascinated by it for years. It's up a steep but short hill, a sort of acropolis on which there are businesses--a carburetor repair shop back in the day ("Captain Carburetor"), though I'm not sure if it's still there; a pizza place. There's an old sign that's been there since I was a kid, stuck into the side of the acropolis. It looks like something out of the 50's, and probably is. When I was a kid the tag line on the sign used to read, "Built to last a hundred years." More recently it has read, "Verbatim reporting since 1938." There's also what appears to be a small apartment building. And there's a house. Now, until a few years ago all this was much more mysterious, because trees on the side of the acropolis blocked much of this from view. But recently they widened the driveway going up and they cut down some of the trees, so you can see more of what's up there. The back of the house also looks out on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. You drive right by this acropolis when you're driving over Dixwell Avenue on the Wilbur Cross, so in that second or two you can get a glimpse of the backside of the house, tantalizingly brief.

I don't have more specific knowledge of what's up on the acropolis because I have never allowed myself to go up there. And I have never allowed myself to go up there because, for some reason, I've always wanted to maintain the mystery. Sometimes I feel very strongly that I want to go and photograph it, because eventually they'll knock the old buildings down. And sometimes I have felt a desperate urge to go there, so desperate that I've wanted to up and leave the house and drive the mile and a half or so. But I haven't.

Here's a picture of the acropolis. The house is the building closest to the highway, to the left. You can't tell the grade from this, but the very long building parallel to the house marks the northern edge of the height. The buildings north of that are lower. The parking lot across the street, on the left side of the image, is just south of my old high school:

Why does this fascinate me? It's just that I wonder what it would be like to live in this place--your back door abutting the highway, in a normal-looking suburban house that is, however, sitting atop pavement, surrounded by businesses. The voyeur in me is intrigued by the idea of being able to monitor the goings-on of the local workforce from my home, while being apart from them.

Well, such the thoughts and verbiage inspired by Clare's essay. Though I have a very strong sense that I've blogged about this before....

Tags: Boxhome, Clare Dudman, Hamden, CT