Home Tours

The promise of sunshine and Craig's casual mention of his plans for the day over a cup of coffee lead to Rem and I accompanying him to a current job site. The pleasant drive extends just long enough to feel like an excursion and Rem happily occupies himself with a pair of binoculars in the back seat. The home, near completion, greets us under a bright blue sky, most of the morning fog having burnt off of the slope. Craig brought me to this site once before in the evening after a nearby party. We walked through the skeleton of a house, just under roof, but still a collection of lines as if just risen from Craig's framing plan. And yet, I knew the spaces from the drawings Craig walked me through at length, even as darkness swept through the wood members that stood simply as a suggestion of the home to come. I am used to following Craig through spaces in his head and any amount of physical support brings a structure to life. The actual built spaces continue to surprise me in their amazing similarities to the earliest sketches but also in the revelations I never seem to anticipate.

Rem follows Craig from the yellow truck, forcing his hands into the mini-pockets of his toddler jeans to mimic his father as they saunter across the gravel drive to the house.

"Are we going to live here?" Rem asks, hopeful.

The scattering of ladders, empty buckets and unopened cans of finish and paint do not hinder my ability to fully see the home. The universal smells of new construction string together happy recollections of my own childhood and adult experiences of sheet rock and sawdust, wood finish and paint thinner.

Craig walks us through quickly before becoming engaged with the contractor and punch lists. Rem and I leave him and together search for Craig in the details of the house. The house, for this purpose, is for me at its most ideal: almost complete yet empty. Craig's vision still permeates, not yet obscured by the client's infusion of the personal accouterments that will make it his own.

Craig's own love of our mountains insures that the client will never lose his sense of this particular mountain setting. Roof lines, clean and pitched in harmony with the ridges beyond also allow the house to rise and fall with the slope, underscoring Craig's aversion to disrupting a site's character with excessive grading. I see Craig present in the prominent, dry-stacked, indigenous stone fireplaces that mark, in individual ways, the symbolic center of his homes. We admire the double sided fireplace that at once anchors all of the public spaces from its post in the living room and creates an intimate coziness for the screened porch on the other side. Rem likes that he can fit inside both. From the outer deck, I indicate the exclamation point, the monumental concrete cap.

Rem loses interest and we chase imaginary bears off of the stone floor of the screened porch and along the wooden bench of the outer deck. We pretend to picnic while enjoying the extensive view of the parkway and the layers of dense fog that linger in spots, suppressing valleys and the lower ridges from the blue sky we are already enjoying.

With the promise of a staircase to climb, I entice Rem back into the house and enjoy the play of light that the abundant glass ushers in. The living snapshots delight us in every room and I anticipate the change of seasons that will rotate through each window. I point to a turkey as it meanders through a stand of trees from one side of the house and catch my breath at the distant snow-encrusted peaks from a bedroom at the opposite end of the house. Craig refuses no one the pleasure of the natural beauty that surrounds the site and from the bathrooms and kitchen, too can the resultant joy of a dramatic sunset or the gradual gratification of the creeping spread of dawn be experienced.

Craig rejoins us as he snaps photos for a field report and Rem rejoices in his foresight to bring binoculars as they easily double as a digital camera of his own and he opens closet doors, snapping pictures for his own report. Too soon do we part. Rem sleeps as Craig and I alternately list the rest of the day's activities. Moments suffice for now. One day we will string them together into happy recollections and the rest, we'll smile over and wish we wouldn't have worried so much.