Mary Hallock Foote, Julia Morgan, Wallace Stegner, houses, homes & hubris

"What is the use of doing anything more than is expected of 'young ladies'!"

I am obsessed with a house. An empty house with freshly painted rooms and wood floors, flooded with light. There’s a quiet place for me to write, space for all three members of our family to sleep; a garage for the Hammond B3 and rent that doesn’t make us feel like fools. Part of me believes by typing this out, this house will materialize.

My friend N tells me this is a hormonal phase, a life phase: the real estate obsession. Certainly our literary hero, Deborah Levy, wrote a book about it, and another one about the Cost of Living, another preoccupation of mine.

Given that I am self-employed and the rhythms of my life are largely of my own creation, I think a lot about metaphorical structures.

What is a house if not the primary structure of one’s life? I need that house. It’s why I have always loved the title of Meghan Daum’s book, which just about nails the feeling haunting my days: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House.

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Through the last decades of the 1800s, Mary Hallock Foote’s family lived “like a bird on a bough” in mining camps from California to Colorado to Idaho. Through her husband’s years of failed enterprises—one dubbed Foote’s Folly—Molly (as she was called) kept the family afloat with her illustration work, magazine stories, and novels. So imagine going from a lifetime of tenuous and makeshift living to walking the staked perimeter of your forever house with Julia Morgan.

Morgan’s best-known work of domestic architecture is Hearst Castle, but her first was the North Star House. Built in 1905 for Molly and her husband, Arthur, the superintendent of the North Star Mine, it’s a showpiece home for entertaining deep-pocketed visitors. But the North Star House was at its heart a family house built on a human scale, “a big, cool, lovely house,” Molly wrote, constructed from materials of its place in what’s called the First Bay Tradition: redwood-shingled exterior, thick stone walls quarried from the mine, cedar interiors, and fir floors.

“This was the house of success,” Molly wrote in a memoir published after her death as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. “But sorrow was built into its walls.”