Soapstoned

We are soapstone people. In the world of kitchen countertop materials (and you didn't know there was such a world, did you), soapstone is a lover, something you just can't help but reach out and touch. People admire their granite, are pleased with their corian or ceasarstone, think their tile is pretty, and love their soapstone. Reading posts on our favorite remodeling community website, GardenWeb, you can hear in the voices of contributors their rapture every time they slice an onion or burn some toast. the passion is palpable.

We want that. We want our space to be a living expression of our lives, not a picturesque shell that contains them. perhaps it is because I spend so much time at home. Writing and living in the same space, I can go days without leaving the house. But E feels the same way (I think). We seek that sense that the house is an extension of what is valuable to us, and that tends to express itself less like objective beauty (What lovely granite!) and more like something that is itself alive (This room feels so warm!).

We also want a house that ages in beauty. You can read into that whatever you like ;-)

Upstairs in the master bathroom, we are considering a unique Moroccan concrete tile (made in Thailand...what a wonderful world) whose color is pressed into the wet concrete under tremendous pressure

 before it is fired. the result is a soft, matte finish tile in those powdery colors one associates with Greek islands and north african mosques. Like saltillos, very soft and inviting.

Driving home from the airport this evening, lamenting being once again in the habitrail of the los angeles freeway system, I started wondering why we were so enamored of all these soft, erotic, and sensual materials. Our last house had none of it. Lots of colorful mexican glazed tile work, talavera sinks, and hand-painted stuff, certainly, but nowhere near the obsession we now seem to feel for building materials you want to touch. 

I think we might be afraid, on some deep level, afraid of the house, of houses in general, and in our attraction for soft comforting materials seek a home of warm embrace, a home we can walk around on and have every surface respond gently to our step or touch, a home not singed by a sharp tongue of flame or grinding grit of charcoal and ash. 

Burnt wood is cold and desolate. think of the logs left cold the next morning after a campfire. it is as if we want our house to be as enveloping as the white egyptian cotton spa robes Elicia loves so much and quickly replaced (as anniversary presents) last week.

In architecture and design, the phrase they use to describe the style of highly detailed repetitive patterns--usually in tile-- that cover every available inch of moorish-style buildings is horror vacui, latin for "fear of empty space" or more poetically, "fear of emptyness." As the Artlex artists dictionary defines it:

horror vacui - The compulsion to make marks in every space. Horror vacui is indicated by a crowded design.  Some consider horror vacui one of the principles of design. Those who exclude it from their list of principles apparently interpret it as posessing an undesirable, perhaps obsessive quality, in contrast to the desirable, controlled principle of limitation, or perhaps to that of emphasis or dominance.

When you live next to the Sahara, a fear of empty space is a rational response.

I think we suffer (without suffering) from something else, a fear of deadness perhaps, or more generally, plasticity. Horror mortis, perhaps? Having seen our home reduced to a dead thing, we want to restore it to life--our life--with surfaces that though inanimate are nonetheless alive to the touch, breathing in their softness and sensuality, and warm in their spirit. 

if the house could, like some mushroom-fueled shimmering mirage, respirate of its own accord, we would, I think, wish it.