Home Zoom studios and other revelations
BALCONIES, WINDOWS AND ANY SPACE THAT CONVERTS INTO YOUR OWN PRIVATE ZOOM STUDIO HAVE NEW PROMINENCE
It’s a long, hot, COVID19 summer, and we are basting in our reactions and, mostly, in our homes.
This pandemic has been too all encompassing for anyone to have confidence that we know what the future holds. After four months of sequestration our homes have revealed their winners and losers.
It’s almost too easy to cite the winners: We all know that any “extra” space in our homes is now seen as a gift. The walk-in closet becomes your Zoom call studio, your guest room becomes your office, your basement becomes a retreat when your kids come back to live with you. We are cooking and the grill is now a daily focus, rather than a Weekend Wonder. And, of course, the garden is a huge Winner of COVID-19, especially now that flowers are flowering.
But there are variations on the winners. Greg Sideleau, of Newtown, lives on a lake and has developed a deep fondness for his “lakeside patio where the swallows perform ballet over the water to music you cannot hear, but they allow you to see the melody.”
When you are forced to stay in, you focus on what is outside our doors. The window is a big winner in the age of COVID-19. Connection and separation in one architectural feature. But more, things are getting rediscovered.
Sue Groner of Bedford, N.Y., discovered the master bedroom balcony of the home she built.
“After 15 years we discovered this space,” she says. “We bought ourselves comfy chairs and a little table and enjoy the coziness, quiet, privacy and the view.”
But perhaps the biggest winner of this COVID season is the dining room table. We are connected by it, separated with it, we work at it, we eat there — the dinner table has become a home within our homes, not just a holiday resort.
But the losers of COVID home life are starkly painful. Now that we cook and eat at home, and the sink has all the byproducts of a day’s consumption to deal with. The coffee table that once had huge, unread “coffee table books” on it now is the collector of all those projects you start, but never do, but never get rid of either. For some, the TV — that altar of binge watching — might be literally falling flat.
Great rooms that once happily accepted returning residents from days of work and school now have become the ground zero of home schooling, Zoom calling, multi-mealing — a space that facilitates so many activities that bump into each other that the room has become virtually polluted. Even the air conditioning that made summer bearable now spreads coronavirus with great efficiency. So we are sweating more, outside.
Like all easy answers, picking winners and losers in our homes is not how we will evolve a postCOVID domestic life. Cori SaNogueira of Greenwich spent several years creating her home — now she has a complex view of the heart of it, the kitchen in light of this COVID season. She now calls it “my beautiful showpiece that I love and hate. It is the place for creating stunning piñata cakes, children’s Zoom baking classes, experimenting with new showstopper recipes. It is also the scene of battles. Battles with the child who has lost control of so much she now controls by not eating, the battle of emotion overeating by another, the battle of my new role of the 1950s housewife who starts in the kitchen at 6:30 a.m. and is in it much of the day until 10:30 p.m. when the counter is scrubbed for the zillionth time. The battle of knowing that my battle is privileged because I can stay home and I have food. My kitchen still proves in this crazy world that I am winning. The guilt is as well.”
No matter how much more we live our lives on Houzz, Zillow and Dwell in these days, that life on line is both vicariously thrilling or a great way to see how you have failed.
It has become true that our homes in a pandemic are an essential touchstone. If you are open to it, where we live is a sharply focused mirror reflecting what we value, beyond the winners and losers on our domestic scorecards.