Once Upon a Time, Only Kings Had Castles
AS you sit reading the newspaper in your armchair, with a scant day left to the millennium, consider this almost too obvious fact: You couldn't have done it a thousand years ago. The newspaper was there. Thanks to Julius Caesar, the Romans had posted news.
But the armchair wasn't, not until the 17th century, unless you happened to be king or queen. With the advent of digital design, the next millennium may remember this one as the Unvirtual Age. Every solution to every problem has been built and tested, sat on and sat in. Why then is the height of civilized comfort sitting sideways in a chair, your legs up and over the arm? Progress is a noble, if comic, idea when you draw a line of domestic achievements, as the House & Home section did, of the last thousand years. Why was the lawn mower, for instance, invented before toilet paper?
But home is not just the house. Francine du Plessix Gray, Janet McTeer and others share their experiences of rooms where spirit has resided, from a refugee tent in Albania to a velvet-walled library in Paris. And the future holds new keys. At NASA, they're nesting. They've hired architects, and they've found the place. They're working on views. The issue is still space.
WILLIAM L. HAMILTON