At Home: Romance during home

Some homes are filled with love. Some homes are done with love. Some homes make we tumble in love.

I usually left a home that was all that. Casa Feliz, a obvious ancestral home in Winter Park, Florida, is so regretful that I’m blissful we toured it with my father or we competence have left off with a gardener.

Built in 1929 by designer James Gamble Rogers, a home resembles a Spanish Cortijo or farmhouse, and looks a century comparison than it is — on purpose. The Casa is so regretful that some-more than 100 couples applaud their weddings there any year.

As a architect’s granddaughter showed us around a weathered section estate, a catering staff was scheming for a wedding. Love was in a air, and debility was in my knees.

What is it about this place? we wanted to know. And could we bottle some of it and move it to my house?

I called architectural historian Susan Sully, author of 12 books on Southern architecture, including “Casa Florida,” a demeanour during regretful Spanish design in a region, to speak generally about intrigue in architecture, and privately about how to get some-more in my house.

“Talk about a place that invites adore and happiness,” Sully says about Casa Feliz. “It has each component a regretful home should have. It tells a story of a opposite time and place. The designer used aged materials to expel a spell. And it was done out of passion.”

The strange owners asked Rogers to build a 5,500-square-foot, Spanish-style farmhouse while they trafficked for a year. Beyond that, Rogers could build a home as he wished. It was an architect’s dream, and, we can tell, Rogers poured his heart into a place.

“But what about those of us who can’t elect an designer to build a Spanish Cortijo?” we ask Sully. “Is it too late for intrigue for us? we mean, for a house, that is?”

(Anyone who got married in a year that starts with 19 knows that after a decade-plus of babies and their 3 a.m. colic bouts, of anticipating someone else’s hair in your showering each day, of carrying done a bills and income come out even usually to find we need a new carburetor, knows that intrigue simply flies out a window, compress fate or no compress curtains.)

“Any character home can be romantic,” she assures me.

“But where does intrigue come from?” we ask.

She takes me literally. “The word ‘romance,’” she says, “comes from a base word ‘Roman,’ and refers to something that has a mislaid and pleasing past.”

“So wait! It’s not flowers and chocolate and candles and diamonds?”

“It’s a richly storied past.”

“To think, I’ve had a wrong expectancy all these years!”

“It’s an antique china tea set that has graced a home, and that layers of amatory hands have delicately spotless over years.”

“Think of all a relations that competence have been saved if people usually realized.”

To assistance me improved understand, Sully explains what a regretful home is not. “Unromantic spaces are immobile environments with no views of a outdoors, all fake materials, and a atmosphere conditioning or heater regulating nonstop.”

“Like my office,” we say.

“Unromantic homes are ideal and pretentious,” she continues. “They put on front rather than tell stories. They don’t entice we to lay down in your nightgown and daydream.”

Wistful sigh.

“Romantic interiors wave we to let your hair down and obey to your senses.”

Ahh, romance. we surrender.

Here, says Sully, are a qualities regretful homes share:

• Access to nature. “A regretful home has to be sensual, and partial of that means saying a outdoors,” Sully says. Many regretful houses have core courtyards, that a residence wraps around. They have French doors that open to gardens, and balconies, terraces and large windows that open adult a residence and bond we to nature. “Being in a room with French doors opening to a outside and a sound of a fountain is really romantic.” If we can’t lift that off, try putting a tiny garden or fountain outward a window.

• Age. Romantic houses are aged or demeanour old. “All of us ring with story and a past,” Sully says. “That’s since aged houses feel regretful in a approach that new homes don’t.” When Casa Feliz was built some-more than 80 years ago, a designer endeavored to make it demeanour a century comparison by regulating unsettled materials. He re-used section before that was fashionable. He deliberately combined exploding outside arches. In newer homes, furnishings with patina, antiques and heirlooms can deliver that unreal dimension.

• Romantic windows. Long, issuing panels of white compress are Sully’s favorite window treatment. “They locate a light and move it in.” Homes are some-more regretful when they’re filled with healthy light.

• Natural materials. Reclaimed wood, chipped ceramic tiles, ragged handles, and faded fabrics all secrete a clarity of a “lost and pleasing past.”

• Imperfection. Materials crafted by palm also feel nostalgic. The winding Spanish roof tiles during Casa Feliz are beautifully unsuitable since they were made by farmer workers frame a clay over their thighs.

Older, natural, unlawful with stories to tell. Romance, we consider it’s possible.

Syndicated columnist Marni Jameson is a humorous syndicated home-design columnist, speaker, and author of “House of Havoc” and “The House Always Wins” (Da Capo Press). Reach her during marnijameson.com.

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