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Back a million years ago in early March, when I decided HOUSE LESSONS: Renovating a Life, by novelist Erica Bauermeister, would be April’s book review, I didn’t know there would be a few house lessons of my own in store, as we collectively hunkered down to figure out and renovate life within the confines of our own quarantined homes.
So with that backdrop, I started reading the newly-released HOUSE LESSONS, Bauermeister’s insightful and emotionally honest memoir of how she and her family rescued and renovated a “ramshackle” house in the coastal town of Port Townsend, in Washington State’s Pacific Northwest.
If you have a soft spot for houses, be it finding, renovating, decorating, seeing their potential, falling irrationally for them or feeling a deep connection with the homes where you’ve lived, then this book will resonate, as it did for me.
House Lessons On Many Levels
On one level, the book is an interesting story about the logistics of renovating a house built in 1909, mixed with a scholarly dollop of architectural history. Among the many architectural tidbits Bauermeister distills, is the fact that the house they found by chance one day while driving around, is an American Foursquare, a house style influenced by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
But on another level, Bauermeister knits the intimate trajectory of her own and her family’s life journey into the story, with musings about love, marriage, kids growing up, finding our roots, the impact parents have on our lives and how our living spaces wind up shaping us, or as Winston Churchill once said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us.”
‘A Home Fits Your Soul’
A former college instructor and real estate agent turned best-selling author, Bauermeister writes that the decisions we make when choosing a home can often be irrational and go against our original specifications for what we say we want.
“Because here’s the thing – we aren’t looking for a house; we’re looking for a home. A house can supply you with a place to sleep, to cook, to store your car,” she writes. “A home fits your soul.”
And I liked how she felt that over and over, it seemed as if the house had been watching out for the family.
There was one letdown moment for me as I read HOUSE LESSONS. I was so invested in the story of bringing this old house back to life, that it was a disappointment to learn that the author and her husband only got the chance to live there years after the actual renovation, renting it out in the meantime.
But all’s well that ends well. They now live there in the house on the hill “looking out over the Victorian roofs of Port Townsend and beyond, to water and islands and clouds.”
Erica Bauermeister is also the author of The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, The Lost Art of Mixing and The Scent Keeper, which was Reese Witherspoon’s book club pick for February 2020.
If you missed it, check out March’s book review of The Girl With The Louding Voice, by Abi Daré.
And in May, look for author Ruth Soukup’s new childrens’ book, How Big Is Your Brave? In June, But Where Do I Put The Couch?: And Answers to 100 Other Home Decorating Questions by Melissa Michaels and KariAnne Wood.
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