Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses by Marjorie Garber

There are some people who picking up this book with it’s titillating title, will be very disappointed to find it an exploration of the meaning and functions of homes over the course of civilization. Part history, part sociology, part interior decoration, but not the least bit steamy. It’s NOT the sequel to that TV show about the 4 ladies in New York City.

Working from the belief that houses are a representation of human erotic and emotional desires, the author examines every possible interpretation of homes and houses in thematic chapters. References abound, everyone from Edmund Spenser and Homer, through Jung, Wilde and the movies of Steve Martin. The cartoons of Thurber features in “The House as Mother”, advertisments from the 1940’s and 50’s in “The House as Body”, Thorstein Veblen in “The Trophy House”. My favorite part of the book was in the chapter ”The House as Beloved” which recounts houses as metaphors in the literature of Austen, the Brontës, Waugh, Wharton and others. Emily Post provides many of the most amusing comments, but also one of the most true: “Your house, to be perfect, must delight and express not your decorator, but you. If the house expresses the architect or the decorator and not the owner, then it’s personality is a song out of tune.”

The book traces not only fashion, but the structure of society and how it has changed the uses of rooms. Kitchens, considered solely the province of servants for centuries, became the heart of a home in the 1930’s and 40’s, where people gathered not only for meals, but also for socializing and family activities. Bedrooms were the reverse, in medieval times they were viewed as part of the public domain, open to visitors and formal meetings. Nowadays we are startled at the very idea of company seeing us abed!

The author makes an interesting comment on the fact that people today have larger houses, but spend less time in them, “Perhaps increasingly, for busy people, space has come to substitute for time, and the house becomes the unlived life….the place where we stage the life we wish we had time to live.”

Garber recounts trends in interior design, fads in real estate and has a nice mix of facts, anecdotes and figures blended with subtle humor. But sometimes she strays from her initial premise into discussions of paint color on historical houses, for example, or repeats points already made several times. Some judicious editing would’ve smoothed the flow of the book. Overall, it was an interesting romp through many facets of an idea, one that while I may not necessarily agree with, provided a cozy bit of entertainment in my messy little apartment.

Random House 2000 230 pp. ISBN 0-375-42054-1