I've completed my homemaking job at the dascha, and returned home to Tel Aviv. It occurs to me that I've now lived in the same place for 17 years, longer than I lived anywhere else, having gone off to college at the tender age of 16. But the home I often think I'm returning to is the one in the photo, because that's the place I spent raising my children. The house had my three dream features: a fireplace, an attic, and windows on all four sides. Strangely, because of its cookie-cutter "design" (I suspect it wasn't designed at all, back in 1935, but "just growed" at the the builder's whim) my current apartment also has windows on all four sides, although one of them is a tiny window in the bathroom. No attic, and no fireplace, though: they are rare architectural anomalies in Israel.
The tudor-style house pictured was a treasure of fine building materials commonly used in the late 1930's in America's Northeastern suburbs: six-panel wooden doors everywhere, brindle brick, casement windows, parquet floors, copper pipes.
It's a funny coincidence: the three places I've lived in longest - my childhood home, my children's childhood home, and my home in Israel - were all built at around the same time, although the materials are far from similar.
Do you have a favorite decade for your home?
1 comment:
My house was also the one where we raised our 3 children. We built this house in 1970 and lived in it for almost 25 years when we downsized to a townhouse. The house we built is of red brick, two story colonial with a portico and columns. We planted southern magnolias, about 6 ft tall which have grown to about 50 ft. It was a great house and neighborhood to raise children but now that we have downsized I would not want to go back.
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