Home and the heart

THE first order of business in the kitchen remodel was to widen the doorway. The contractor went to work on the doorjamb with a crowbar. Nails screamed, the wood came free, and an avalanche of brick and debris crashed into the room. The owner was horrified -- and stunned by the force of her feeling. “Hey, this was just a kitchen remodel and suddenly I felt as if someone had unzipped my skin and made me look at my own bones.”

Nothing people hear or read -- no cable TV fix-it show or glossy shelter magazine -- can prepare them for the personal intensity of some moments in home ownership.

Yet the human connection to home is, after all, primal and profound. Recently, a number of very different books have set out to explore this connection, which suggest a new appetite for house books that are both less escapist than the foreign-home-remodel-memoir and more emotionally, psychologically and environmentally aware than the usual how-to library of decorate, fix-up and buy/sell titles.

‘House: a Memoir’

In “House: a Memoir,” author Michael Ruhlman and his wife, Donna, take possession of a grand, if neglected, century-old house in his hometown of Cleveland. On his website, Ruhlman writes, “The experience of purchasing a home place, among the most common events in an adult’s life, felt more cataclysmic than, well, buying a house ought to feel. Second to childbirth on the seismic charts of human emotion.”

Ruhlman originally began his book as a novel in which to unpack and explore the emotions stirred up by his house purchase. He did not, he said, think the subject was “important enough” for a book-length work of nonfiction. His agent thought otherwise, and urged him to recast the book as the memoir the novel was thinly disguising. Ruhlman, a yeoman journalist, interweaves his personal tale with thought-provoking essays into house lust, American itinerancy, the streetcar suburb, ghosts, Cleveland and reclaiming one’s geographical roots. In gutting the house, he gets a crash course in a house’s inner workings. In researching the specific history of his home and neighborhood, Ruhlman not only unearths curious facts and meets local characters, he also discovers that the micro history of his new property directly connects to the greater stories of suburb, city, state and nation. He learns much about the home’s former occupants, and locates his own family in the ongoing narrative of place. The memoir itself is an act of integration and connection, a self-portrait of emotional expansion and a mature, unsentimental happiness.

As such, “House” signals a new, more domestic and psychologically aware direction for the home-makeover memoir. Ruhlman’s home, after all, is not a quaint ruin in the south of France, or Italy, or San Miguel de Allende, but a big shabby old manse in an older suburb of a mid-American city. Of course, to the average American who moves every four years, making a home in the suburbs may well seem as exotic as colonizing a crumbling villa in Tuscany. At any rate, to the rest of us who have been setting down roots and trying to make sense of it all, Ruhlman says much of what we need to hear, his parochial subject matter clearly “important enough.”

‘House Thinking’

Whereas Ruhlman reveals a lot about homes by focusing on one, Winifred Gallagher in “House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live,” ranges through many houses and disciplines to discover how various rooms we inhabit shape our lives.

Gallagher, whose previous books include “The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions” and “Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual,” here employs the new social science of environmental psychology (along with healthy helpings of history, architecture and philosophy) to ask how the decisions made in our domestic world reveal and influence our inner world and how we might then make better domestic choices.

An engaging book, “House Thinking” is more free associative and less systematic than the subtitle suggests. Homes, we’re told, should have places where we can nest, and places where we can perch -- that is, places where we can retreat, curl up, snuggle and places where we can look out on the world, see the sky, survey the realm. The living room for Gallagher is the most expressive room; the dining room is all about “status and stuff,” where we show off family heirlooms and collections. The bathroom is viewed in terms of the body-consciousness and health; the bedroom, privacy and sex.

Homes can encode our family traditions and habits. Homes express our unconscious longings and nostalgias and, of course, neuroses. As someone who recently realized with a start that she’d painted her present bedroom the same colors as her childhood bedroom, I was not surprised to learn that we unconsciously re-create our environmental pasts.

Witold Rybczynski describes home as “a private refuge that provides comfort, meaning and beauty.” Such an understanding of home, Gallagher repeatedly stresses, is a surprisingly recent development. Indoor plumbing became widespread only around the turn of the last century, air conditioning in the 1950s. Stoves entered kitchens in the mid-19th century -- before that, there was the walk-in fireplace, a constant peril to women cooking in long skirts and petticoats. (Ruhlman, who covers some of the same ground in his book, puts such historical thinking in context when, after “camping out” in the one-room attic with his family for six months, he describes using his luxuriously appointed new kitchen for the first time as “time-traveling from the 16th century to the present.”) No wonder we are often awkward in our own homes -- in evolutionary terms, we’ve had about two minutes to adjust to them.

I have often felt that owning a home was like growing another skin -- one that sheltered me but also enlarged my sensitivity. How affirming, then, to read that home is an extended self, that “valued things are nothing less than part of who we are,” and, even more profoundly, that “many cultures have personified the home as a body with a private interior and social exterior, complete with front and back, top and bottom, and clean and dirty parts, and vulnerable to attack, even rape.” When “our precious things are lost or damaged, our reactions range from nostalgia to grief not unlike that over the loss of a beloved person.” No wonder Ruhlman felt such rampaging emotions when buying a home and likened it to the birth of a child. It’s true. Homes R Us.

Thus too do homes reveal us as the materialists we are. Such materialism, however, is not to be confused, of course, with materialism’s crass cousin, consumerism. Gallagher is careful to differentiate house-thinking from more superficial modes of house-attention -- mere decorating and elective remodeling. The “true homebody temperament” is not the same as the person engaged in “domestic splurging” during this “prolonged spell of affluence that began in the 1980s.” Many improvements, Gallagher says, can be made without spending a cent -- for example, throw away that bathroom scale!

I would argue, however, that most of us home-involved folk are a spirited mix of homebody and domestic splurger, especially at this particular time in history when cocooning and home-improvement has been facilitated by the explosion of property values and its dubious offspring, the home equity line of credit. Many of the people who are tearing down walls (and discovering just how psychically disturbing it is to see rubble in one’s own home) will find Gallagher’s book enlightening and helpful. Those same people, I daresay, would not reject a gift certificate from Home Depot -- or Roche Bobois.

‘American Green’

If Gallagher wants us to become more environmentally aware of what’s inside our homes, environmental historian Ted Steinberg wants us to become more aware of what’s right outside our front doors.

Perhaps there’s something in Cleveland water (or in the domestic glories of those gorgeous older suburbs) but, like Ruhlman, Steinberg also found the subject for his next book -- lawns -- after moving to a Cleveland suburb, Shaker Heights. Having been raised in suburban Long Island -- or, as he writes, Lawn Guyland -- Steinberg initially thought the obsession with lawns there was unique, “yet another example of Long Island’s zaniness.” In Shaker Heights, however, he found “the prevailing turf culture made the tidy lawns of my Merrick past look like a bunch of beat-up old cow pastures.”

Why, he wondered, were so many Americans fixated on crew-cut grass? His slyly cheerful new book, “American Green, The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,” examines how the multibillion-dollar lawn industry has sold the lawn-tending public a bill of often gratuitous goods.

Steinberg tells of the dizzying rise and success of the Scott seed and lawn care company, uncovers the loose-to-useless EPA controls on lawn chemicals, the spurious safety record of lawn mowers, and records step by step the process by which a search for perfection and obsession with absolute conformity has turned the lawn into a thoroughly inorganic, temperamental monoculture that’s every bit as dependent on fossil fuel as the SUV parked in the driveway.

With a light touch, Steinberg uncovers a degree of obtuseness and denial about lawn-related safety issues that mirrors the present administration’s attitude toward global warming and the general public’s tacit complicity in ignoring environmental dangers. To break the lawn chemical/water addiction, Steinberg offers various practical alternatives and partial solutions -- from xeriscaping to zoysia grass to simply allowing clippings to stay on the grass, which all but eliminates the need for nitrogen feedings. Most of all, he advises us to loosen up about the lawn, learn to love a little brown, a little clover and let those clippings lie.

If these three books are any indication of a trend, it would be that home-ownership is having its consciousness raised. And this is good news. As we merrily max out those home equity lines of credit and start working more hours to pay inexorably rising interest rates, at least we’ll have our own appropriately customized refuge to retreat to at day’s end. A place of self-expression, a place of privacy. A place to survey our lawns, with new satisfaction, as they brown.

Michelle Huneven is coauthor with Bernadette Murphy of “The Tao Gal’s Guide to Real Estate: Six Modern Women Discover the Ancient Art of Finding, Owning and Making a Home.”