REST CAN GO, BUT THE WINDMILL STAYS

This past Sunday our home in South City was the setting for the  St Louis Arts & Crafts Society’s 2012 holiday tour.  About seventy-five persons walked thru between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon on an unseasonably warm and pleasant December day.  A good time was had by all.

If, as they say, “architecture in general is frozen music “ ¹ , then I will be the first to admit my house is a polka –  a Southside Arts & Crafts bungalow where room after room of stained fir woodwork and built-in cupboards and benches beat a relentless oom-pah-pah rhythm of Germanic  order.  Rooms adhere to their prescribed roles, cajoling their occupants to do the same.  There’s no mere walking from space to space; you Process.  Hierarchy of areas signaled by size and appointment give unequivocal distinction between rooms for guests versus those for family, those for adults versus those for children.  And throughout there’s this vocabulary of wood and plaster and doors, Doors, DOORS infusing daily life with a rhythmic waltz of vision and sound.  All this and a view of the Bevo Mill, too.

¹ Friedrich von Schelling,  nineteenth century German philosopher