Window Tax

Having stripped the house, I think we have solved one of the lasting enigmas that had puzzled us since we bought it.  Downstairs in the living room we had early on discovered two large 4' windows that had been boarded up and plastered inside and stuccoed over on the outside. In the dining room, more obviously, was a similarly sealed picture window, much larger, which though plastered inside had been left framed on the exterior, its sill intact, a piece of plywood where the glass once lived.  We heard told that the picture window was removed by the last owners, and English family, to make room for the large family heirloom china closet they put on that wall. Ron, the old man who lived next door for 45 years,  told us this.

But we had never figured out the living room, resting with an assumption that the windows had been boarded when the house next door arose to present a view of a stuccoed garage wall.

Having stripped the plaster thoroughly, though, it now appears that the wood used to close all three windows is identical, leading us to now believe that the three windows were all boarded at the same time.

History supports this view. During the late 17th century in England, the King wanted to raise funds. Unable, or unwilling, to leverage an income tax on a landed aristocracy that found disclosing your income bad form, but wanting to draw revenue from the rapidly growing merchant class, they came up with the inventive progressive solution to impose a "glass tax." Working from the assumption that the richer you were, the larger house you could afford and the larger the house, the more windows it had, King William III instituted a tax on windows in under the Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money in 1696. The more windows you had, the more you paid.

The tax was unpopular, as all taxes are,and some by some as a tax on "light and air." Nevertheless, it persisted for 200 years or so, forging an indelible mark on both English architecture and culture. Anti-tax crusaders (the Republicans of their day no doubt), rather tan risk getting their heads chopped off or some other medieval grotesquery, simply bricked up their windows. Over time, people built fewer windows into their homes and got used to living in the dark.

Which brings us back to Casita Moreno. Our English predecessors, presumably attracted by the lack of rain but repulsed by the incessant beating of the glorious SoCal sun, simply boarded it up, removing any pretensions our little box had to sunny warmth and, coincidentally, destroying any flow-through ventilation the house ever had. Though the saying supposes that mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, perhaps it's because when you go out you can wear a hat and even Englishmen won't wear their bowlers around the house.

Our new casita will have glorious light and the wafting scent of night jasmine and mock orange blossoms on the cool night air. It will breathe once again.