Comings and Goings

My husband and I once attended a seminar about landscape design, and one kernel I clearly remember from the day-long session was the importance of understanding where you want people to linger, where you want them to keep moving along, and how to achieve those ends. Sort of a Lord’s Prayer of landscape architects, I suppose. And what the lesson boiled down to was that if you want people to linger, to gather, to rest, you need to give them a place and a space to land.

The men leading the seminar probably talked about patios and paths (that part I don’t clearly remember), but a primary example of theirs was front stoops. And what they considered to be the gravest of offenses were stoops that were too small. This makes sense to me, because if a front doorway is the face of your house or building, a too-small stoop is the pinched mouth offering up a less-than-friendly welcome. You might as well post a sign that reads Go Away, which, coincidentally, I did just see the other day in front of someone’s house, though I have to assume it was a joke.

Some of the photographs included in the presentation we went to showed stoops so undersized that people had to step down off them when the screen door or storm door opened outward. This situation of insufficient clearance constitutes not just an error of aesthetics but a chronic safety issue, one I hadn’t ever considered. But as is the case whenever you learn something new or have your attention drawn to something you never previously noticed, you start to look at the world around you a bit differently. And so I began the habit of mentally redesigning the front of people’s houses.

Currently, I live in an old house with an uncovered side stoop by the kitchen door, and a roofed front porch. And maybe I’m just looking for trouble where there isn’t any, but the proportions of both seem off to me.

The stone-and-concrete side stoop makes a solid first impression, given the materials it’s built with and the inviting way it flares out at its lowest step and leads you upward as it narrows. All well and good and pleasing to the eye—or it would be if it hadn’t been sullied with a cheap metal railing installed ignominiously right down its center, and if we were more meticulous about pulling the weeds that grow up from the cracks in the failing mortar—but when you arrive at the top, the landing, watch where you put your left foot down. Because there’s a scant eighteen inches between where the door opens and the thirty-inch drop-off at the edge. My dog fell off when she was a puppy, and I’m sure it felt to her like it was a very long way down. (Not to worry, though. She was fine.)

In the winter, the snow accumulation at this entrance, including the ice that slides off the standing-seam metal roof after the fact and that develops during post-storm freeze-thaw cycles, make the lack of elbow room to the left even iffier and the surface even more treacherous. And of course the well-justified fear of slipping on the ice is the reason that ugly railing was installed.

This side stoop is nowhere near original to the house, though it has possibly been in place since the 1950s, when the last family moved in. The front porch, however, is undoubtedly original. It takes only a quick glance at the ornate, late Victorian railing, posts, and gingerbread trim that frame it to determine as much. The porch is definitely pretty, and useful for keeping the rain away from the living room windows and front entrance, especially now that we’ve had the porch reroofed, but it’s not a good place to land and linger.

It seems to me that the front railing functions like a traffic barricade, limiting access and constraining the dimensions of the porch, which spans the width of the facade but is quite narrow depthwise. So if you were to sit there with anyone, you’d have to be lined up in a row. And honestly, if I did sit there, all I would do is stare at close range at the railing and think about how I should really get to bleaching the black mold that’s taken hold there and holy cow does it need repainting. But being able to sit on the front porch at all would require that we put chairs there, which in the nearly four years we’ve lived here we haven’t done. Because not only is the porch a bit too much on the skinny side for comfort, it’s also a collection point for dust and pollen, as well as for soot from passing cars on our busy-ish road, so the chairs would just be something else we’d have to clean. And although I sweep the porch floor from time to time, that effort is not anywhere near enough, especially since a bat that resides behind one of the exterior window shutters leaves a scattering of guano. Although, to look on the bright side, at least someone uses the porch.

Analogously, when we first moved in to our last house, we had one bedroom—out of two, mind you—that we never went into. It was just my husband and me then, and I had set that space up as a sewing room, but it was just never comfortable, so the room remained unused. What I eventually learned about myself was that contrary to my taste in porches, which I prefer open and expansive, my taste in rooms is for hemmed-in, cozy, and on the lighter side of cave-like.

My point, though, is that if you’ve gotten it right, you’ll know. Because if you haven’t, whatever it is—a room, a porch, a patio, a garden space—will sit lonely and forlorn. You won’t be drawn to it. And it does seem like that feeling has the potential to drift into the energy of the people inhabiting it. The design we surround ourselves with directly affects our day-to-day lived experience, not just on the level of the practical and the logistical, but on our well-being.

And my well-being is boosted by the front doorway to my house, which I think is perfect. Its handsome double doors impress without intimidating. Its ampleness welcomes like a wide smile. Although given that the glass on the doors desperately needs cleaning, because washing windows is on my Things I Don’t Feel Like Doing list, that entrance is like a wide smile in need of having its teeth brushed.

What those doors also do—their rather obvious function aside—is create a focal point. Going back to the face analogy, the front doorway is what appears in a non-full-length portrait. A doorway is the synecdoche, the stand-in, for the house. The popularity of the Doors of Dublin poster is a testament to the impact a doorway can make.

Now, architectural or hardscaping work can be very expensive to do or redo, and we can’t all have portrait-worthy houses. To quote Eeyore, if somewhat out of context, “We can’t all, and some of us don’t, and that’s all there is to it.” But a little imagination, a few well-placed plantings, and a gallon of just the right color paint can at the very least trick the eye into looking past imperfect proportions or less-than-ideal materials. And for all the seeming perfection of my front doors, they don’t actually close unless you body-slam them.

The path leading to the front doors is on another of my lists, Projects That I Am Planning to Get to in My Lifetime. The path’s flaws are many. Chief among them is that every Halloween, which is a big-deal holiday here, some poor kid has tripped over the edge of one of the large stones that has heaved, and consequently spilled the contents of his or her bag or basket and burst into tears.

Another of the path’s problems is that its straight-line and right-angled layout might be suitable to military marches, but not to normal, day-to-day human behavior, because people don’t walk at right angles and in single-file formation. Yes, this does fall into the category of First World problems, but I say that it matters nonetheless. Not that we get a lot of foot traffic at our front door, but if it should at some point increase—such as when my husband eventually reattaches the doorbell and removes the prominent and unsightly handwritten sign announcing that it doesn’t work—it would be more convenient, and also better for our lawn, if the path under our visitors’ feet followed a more intuitive route or routes. The path’s current configuration either puts people on edge or makes them fall on their face. Not an auspicious beginning.

One of the most iconic of front entrances, at least in the United States, is the brownstone stoop found in New York City, urban Upstate New York, and other cities of the Northeast. Part of the brownstone stoop’s appeal, I think, is its solidity, its ability to endure. (If you’re lucky enough to have one, you probably hope that yours will endure, since they’re a fortune to fix.) This solidity makes a brownstone stoop not only a beautiful, memorable point of entry and departure but also an excellent spot to sit down, take a load off, and watch the comings and goings of the neighbors and strangers around you. And you don’t even need tickets for that entertainment.

Village and farmhouse front porches serve that same purpose, although not ours, since we never sit there.

Meandering back to the side of our house again, we pass through the gate in our nineteenth-century wrought-iron fence. Or we will soon, now that the welder has returned our calls. Then after a brief stretch of lawn, a short bluestone path leads to the stone patio surrounding the kitchen-door stoop. Between the path and the patio there used to be a fussy garden arch with a full-length gate, another point of entrance and departure. But like the front porch railing, it sent a message that read Keep Out, and besides, it was crooked and rotted and not easily fixable, so when we relaid the stones of the path to tidy up that approach, we removed and dismantled the garden arch and its gate rather than bothering to repair it. It would have been more trouble than it was worth, and we decided we had bigger fish to fry. Giving a new twist, however, to the idea that nature abhors a vacuum, an overhanging branch of a cedar has begun to form an arch of its own over the opening.

A few steps farther along, after all those comings and goings and stairs climbed and doorways entered and paths followed, we land in the back garden. Not quite yet a place to rest, but absolutely a place to linger. Now we just need some chairs.