The Most Beautiful House In The World

                Every so often I find a book that is exceptionally good, to me at least. A couple weeks ago while rummaging through a couple boxes of books at my favorite book store, (City Books) I came across a book with a nice looking dust cover, pebbled paper with a watercolor of a house on it. It was entitled The Most Beautiful House in the World. It was written by Witold Rybczynski. (1989) The paper was ivory colored and there were small pencil drawings that accompanied the story. I added it to my pile, never realizing that it would be the best book in the pile.

                At home, I started looking through the books reading a little bit of each of them. When I picked up this book, I stuck with it until I had finished it. The others were forgotten.

Witold had a vision of building a boat, something a bit larger than a row boat or a canoe, something seaworthy. He had spent years drawing up designs, changing them as his desires changed. He decided that he would need a place to build this craft and so, being an architect he started designing a boat house.

                This wonderful book takes from his early days of designing his boat through the design and construction of a place to build it and eventually, the changing of the shop into a home. As he tells this story, he also tells us about how buildings are designed and how they are made to fit into the neighborhood He also explains how some designers make buildings which don’t fit into the neighboring structures. He tells to us how cathedrals are basically just large barns. He explains about feng-shui and how it is important to make a house that fits into the landscape, spending 5 or 6 pages describing it and giving examples. He tells us about famous architects and how they put their ideas onto paper and eventually into the ground.

                While he builds his shop, he changes his ideas about how it should be built frequently. This is all part of the process of designing a proper building. Usually when he is working he is filling someone else’s desires and this can become frustrating, not so much for him who needs only an eraser and a pencil to change things, but for the builders who might have to remove something already built. There are times while building his boathouse when he has to do just that.

                In the end, once the shop has been built and he drags out the boat plans he had drawn years ago, he realizes that he no longer wants to build a boat, he has already built something with his hands, the shop. He and his wife decide to change it into a house.

                During this process, he explains the things that make a house a home. It isn’t so much the size, shape or design of the building as it is the way it is lived in. He writes about how houses are personalized and eventually start to resemble their owners. He takes us to a small house built by a man in Los Amusgos, Mexico. The place was small and it started out just a concrete slab in a tight community. The owner and builder slowly started with walls and a roof, some of the walls just plastic. Over time the house became more solid and the outside was decorated with plants, spices and flowers which helped give the house a lived in look and also shielded it from the street that sat beside it. The inside was decorated with pictures of the children and by the children. Over time, the house was personalized. The house is still being built, it is a process in the works but still, it is a beautiful house, it is a home!

                In this book Witold has taken us to Ludwig’s castle, Neuschwanstein, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a small house in a crowded city and to his own house, not to mention many, many others.  Cathedrals through barns, he covered it all. In the process he explains quite elegantly how a house becomes a home.  Witold also has a great way of tell a story, it was a book I didn’t want to end!

Not only that but the copy I got really looks and feels nice also, I put those things high as part of my appreciation of books!