Georgetown Review 2006 Issue

We wanted a new home, badly. But my husband and I had searched high and low and found only houses. Houses are poor substitutes for homes. Then one Sunday our prayers were answered in the classified section of the Washington Post. Among the same-old ads for million-dollar ranchers and tear-down splits, a new listing glinted like a vein in a deep, dank mine: “19th-century Victorian, 4-bedrooms, 6 fireplaces, wood floors throughout, barn, cottage, 5 acres.” The price appeared to be missing a zero.

Within an hour I was standing on its porch, dead set on ownership. The house looked the perfect family haven, the kind featured in beguiling advertisements for life insurance or weatherproof paint.

Although we already owned a home, we had outgrown it. After we adopted a son and daughter from Korea, our pinched 1,900-square-feet shrank like woolens in a dryer. We hoped to trade up to a family room, dining room, guestroom, or basement, all of which we were sorely lacking. As ex-urban suburbanites, we also had romantic designs on the country—on a field-racing, branch-hanging, walking-stick-in-stream-poking idyll of youth and innocence. We’ll find sanctuary in nature, we thought. We’ll escape the infectious spread of spending. For an epidemic of wealth was depopulating the Washington, D.C., suburbs of anyone who wasn’t pretending to some throne, or at least attaching an indoor pool to a house that resembled a Las Vegas resort. Out among the flora and fauna, our children could play with other children—not pint-sized führers ruling underground suites of in-home theaters and mini juice bars, voice-controlled robots programmed with “attitude,” play cottages to make the homeless weep, and sufficient craft supplies to decorate every flashy float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

That was what we thought we needed. What we wanted was more troublesome: a new home that was old. Years before, in Massachusetts, we had renovated an 1839 Greek Revival. While there was no historic dwelling we wouldn’t inhabit—Italianate brownstone, Creole bungalow, Gothic Revival cottage—the understated elegance of our young democracy’s “National Style” was bred in our bone. The problem was, in suburban Maryland, intact architectural antiques were as rare as rubies and priced accordingly.

Such was the nature of our hubris.