The houses we live in, we first inhabit in our imagination. I love writers who use their imagination to paint living breathing homes that stay within us long after the books they reside in are shut and put away. I love the gracious Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca which is not just a well loved historic estate home but a protagonist in its own right with its mysterious drive way, its flower filled balconies, its weather beaten yet imposing walls. Manderley, “secretive and silent..grey stone shining in moonlight, its mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace.”
We explore Manderley, its stunning battalions of rhododendrons, its overflowing rose garden, the exquisite, “fragile” morning room, its sweeping stairways, dark panelled, musty library and its minstrel’s gallery. We touch its curtains twisting in the sea kissed breeze, tip toe across the great hall with the flagged stone floor, breathe in the smells of its seasons and its secrets. It is a picture postcard so compelling that once you set your eyes on it..you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.
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Another favourite of mine is Gone with the Wind’s plantation home Tara. What a memory this is, what a nostalgic tug, what an overwhelming mixture of joy, loss, comfort and healing. Tara is where we see a young, peevish Scarlett O’ Hara getting dressed for a ball surrounded by frothing dresses in all the hues of the summer, nursing a broken heart and a childish scheme around a dimly lit dining table, then becoming a petulant bride and a restless widow. As a young mother, she goes away to Atlanta to seek a new life but has to bring her family back through war ravaged wastelands to Tara which though denuded of its former glory is now the refuge that Scarlett will long for everytime she is broken. This is where she will come to be whole. To be healed. She will always miss Tara and its white brick walls, its red, swelling acres, dogwood and peach blossoms, miles of cotton,“the click of china and the rattle of silver,” the dining table with its “yellow yam open and steaming with melted butter dripping from it.”
This is the house she will fight to save from war, poverty, disease and carpetbaggers and we will root for it and her because by now we love Tara almost as much as she does.
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, lovingly details a ranch in New South Wales, Australia. Drogheda is where we see the seasons of love and longing, echoes of droughts and fires, tragedy and short lived summers of peace but all through we are mesmerised by the description of the house and the paddocks. We love it when the toxic spirit of Mary Carson is exorcised from the house by Fiona Cleary who strips the living room of its past and paints it a creamy white, uses silk panels with roses to cover ovals in the walls and uses prized Aubusson carpets to cover the floor and frees a bunched up chandelier to gleam in all its glory. My book Perfect Eight too creates a home I would atleast like to visit once in my life. A home with flower strewn gardens and large picture windows.
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Even the much reviled Mills and Boon novels have soul-filling descriptions of living spaces and gardens as if in acknowledgement that for a woman, the pull of a dream home can never be underestimated. Most successful female novelists right from George Eliot, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and others have relished creating imaginary homes. Ayn Rand ofcourse celebrated architecture in Fountainhead like no one has before or since her path breaking book. As design writers, we too recreate homes we visit with our words and hope that our readers will see, feel, touch, experience what we did. It is not exactly in the league of creating a Manderley or a Tara for a reader to live in, but it comes pretty close. And all of us hope to live in a picture book home too. Someday.
**This story was published in a design magazine a few years ago.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.