Editorial 10.4, April 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich All the Perches That Make a Proper Nest My husband, Hans, has subscriptions to both Fine Woodworking and Fine Homebuilding, two really marvelous publications from Taunton Press. I’m not particularly interested in all the details of construction and finishing, but I love looking through the photos of gorgeous buildings, rooms, and furniture. Both magazines feature traditional and modern designs, anything from the whimisical to the austere, to the fussily detailed and intricate to the sleek and smooth. One of the designs in the latest issue* of Fine Woodworking is a Japanese step tansu. This is, essentially, a stairwell that doubles as a dresser. Or a dresser that serves as stairs. This particular tansu is made with cherry and quilted maple; it’s a lovely piece of furniture. Eventually, when I get my office back out of the house and this room gets turned into our new bedroom, as planned (lessee, about six years ago?), Hans will build a raised bed with a walk-in closet underneath and a step tansu on the side so we won’t have to climb up a ladder to get into bed, as we do now. I suppose I should explain a few things. Our current bedframe is about five feet high, and has a half-sized closet, shelves, and a dresser built into it underneath. It is sort of a glorified captain’s bed, but freestanding, projecting into the room. Both Hans and I have each fallen out of bed. Once. I’ve slipped on the ladders a few times, too (usually on getting out of bed). The bed is one of the things that delighted me when I first saw the house: such an efficient use of space! Likewise, a tansu is an efficient doubling of function that utilizes space well. But that’s not really why I like it. It’s because I like perches. My bedroom in the house I grew up in was filled with perches: the closet was a wooden box, with a flat space on top from which I could leap to my bed, or look out over the study. The tongue-in-groove wooden ceiling slanted down at an angle from the ridgebeam, forming an open triangle over my closet. My bedroom and the study, and my parents’ bedroom, were all on a large loft that formed the second storey of the house. The sun would come in through the big floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and the indirect light would fill my bedroom with a warm, brilliant glow. My dresser was next to the closet, and I would pull the drawers out partway and climb up them, get on top of the dresser, and then scramble my way up to the top of the closet, where we stored jigsaw puzzles and a few stuffed animals. Sometimes I would sleep up there, although I was always a little nervous about rolling off in the night, so I didn’t sleep very soundly. It was a great place to read, or look out through the windows and daydream. It was a wonderful place to hide, at least momentarily, because people don’t tend to look up. I could sit there and look down on the developing bald spot on my father’s head—not a child’s usual view of her father. I had another perch, too: on either side of the short entryway into my bedroom were the furnace pipes. This created a miniature hallway of sorts, about three or four feet deep. My father boxed them in and built bookshelves into the slim space available (about six inches wide on either side). They flanked the interior opening and doubled as ladders that I could climb. The peak of the ceiling was right above the doorway, and so he built a sturdy eight-foot ceiling, with an opening above that let air and light into my room and allowed me to sit overhead and look out to the room beyond. I loved it. It was an open and airy roomlet, somehow secret, a ready-made fort or interior crow’s nest into which I would drag pillows, cats, peanut butter sandwiches, and, of course, books. It was snug and cozy and warm in the winter because of the furnace and fireplace pipes. Last month, with the help of several friends and my spouse (thank you, Gabe, Hans, Hannah, Mali, Monique, Raz, Scott!) I moved the Ester Republic office back into our house and our bedroom-in-waiting. This room has a very high ceiling, big windows on the southwest wall and high narrow ones on the eastern wall. When the sun shines, it glows with light. The office will be here temporarily (probably another winter, alas), and then it will be moved again and we can get back to work on building build the bed and the dresser and the window bench. So they’ll be halfway up the wall—well, that’ll just give us a different perspective on things, wouldn’t you say? *Looking at the six to eight inches of new snow outside, the cover seems rather optimistic: “June 2008”. | ||
 | | |
