Great Rooms

When I'm talking about the kind of house I want to live in, I like to be sitting in one, preferably in the house’s great room, the open space that's in between the kitchen and the fireplace, where the greatness happens. It’s a small plot of greatness—four hundred to seven hundred square feet of greatness. Some say that a great room is the heart of a house, but that’s not true. It’s the house’s soul, the part that, in its life-affirming radiance, pulses energies out to the house’s furthermost corners, sustaining them in a blood-like, continually-circulating aura of positivity. 

How large does a room have to be in order to be considered ‘great’? Thirty feet, though twenty is okay. The rules about how big great rooms need to be are squishy, like the couches that some people put at the ends, instead of fireplaces. A twenty-foot room can be great if it’s wider than fifteen feet, but nineteen feet is never going to be long enough, unless the room is also thirty feet wide—then, switcheroo, the fireplace / couch and kitchen are on the sides. Height, though not immaterial, isn’t central to greatness, for large rooms can be great with low ceilings while a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room will never be great, even if the ceiling is a hundred feet high. If Michelangelo paints a mural on it, yes, then it’s great, but that’s the only way.

Talking about great rooms is the best way to spend your time in them. In a way, it’s the only thing to talk about, when you’re sitting or standing in them. Say someone sits on the couch in a great room and, after talking about why it’s a couch, instead of a fireplace, tries talking about something like differential Calculus. He won’t even get past his first nonlinear equation before someone else notices the exposed beams running along the top of the vaulted ceiling. If they’re wooden beams, she’ll point to them and gasp; if they’re steel, she’ll also point but not as stiffly—and without gasping. That’s because wood makes people nostalgic, for forests, if they grew up there or saw the pictures, or for their mothers if they were bottle-fed from a Tommee-Tippee, which sounds like the name of a tree. 

Conversations about great rooms tend to spur more conversations about great rooms when they take place in great rooms. While the subject alone draws people into these conversations, one’s presence in the room itself opens the door more, providing additional pathways to it (entries into the conversations). When you’re inside of a great room, you can talk about it, then point to the different parts of it (fireplace/couch), then talk about yourself pointing to those parts, as you point to them and talk about them. It only makes sense: Great rooms represent greatness, and the greatest conversation of all is about great rooms. 

You take a normal person, a person with a job, bills to pay, responsibilities, and, using a giant hand or a group of likeminded conspirators, place him inside a great room—presto, he will instantly become great, or at least greater. He will be elevated, puffed up, more than he once was, the way cookies, after being cooked, are more than just the cookie dough they started out as. He has been cooked, and is now higher up than he once was—more solid, though hopefully similar, overall, in temperature. 

Some people say that the air inside great rooms is thinner than the air is outside great rooms, but I don’t believe it, and not just because people lie. It’s the same air—there’s just less of it inside great rooms. It stays low to the ground, where we are, so we can breathe it easily. Up, above, by the ceiling and those exposed beams, that’s where the thin air is, providing dead space into which we can pour our hopes and other feelings that cannot be realized. In this way, at least at the floor level, great ideas can be conceived in great rooms, and—if you’re alone, and an attractive person saunters into the great room, the one where you are already, and no one else does, just them—also, if you remembered the day before to decrease your anti-anxiety medication, great sex can happen in them, too. 

Naysayers disagree, citing the false claim that, “The greater the room, the less great the sex,” but statements like these are made only by those who've never spent time inside of great rooms, let alone owned them, and who haven’t done things in them like kiss, let alone have sex. 

Interestingly, letting people alone often draws them closer to you, as people tend not to like feeling pressured to interact with others but would rather believe they exercise autonomy—and this desire is fanned by great rooms. The extra space, at the floor level, combined with the thinner air, above, blow on this desire, igniting our illusions of independence and, unfortunately, sometimes also third degree burns. The thin, dead space above pushes down, into us, inciting us to propel ourselves outward, toward others; similarly, the spaces in-between us—seemingly separating us—act as vacuums, pulling us closer together still. 

That’s right—despite the depressing, box-like, conservative, dull, inert, dead vibe they gloomily announce, great rooms are actually playful, muscular puppet masters, jovially manipulating us into fun acts we wouldn’t—in lowly craftsman numbers, or even in modern spaces that are too small to be considered great—engage in ourselves. Not to worry—these fun acts that the great room puppet masters cajole us into are never more dangerous than what we can handle, so long as they don't involve CAA agents. With their face tatts and handlebar staches, those muscular puppet masters may appear ominous, but just talk to them for five minutes about their backyard conifers and you’ll see that, like the Sitka Spruces they claim they can never find the time to trim, they're also gentle giants, pushing us to our limits, yes, but not one inch beyond them, so long as beyond the limits there are no CAA agents—for who can resist those beady-eyed sycophants whose pressed collars smell of patchouli oil and whose pockets are always lined with Lakers floor tickets? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know this: It is not the puppet masters. 

It happens this way: 

You find yourself inside a great room. Never mind how you got there. Let’s just say it’s your lucky day. Let’s just say you recently won the Lotto and are that rare individual who doesn’t immediately need to declare bankruptcy. Across the Herman Miller coffee table you spy her, sprawled in a Pilates pose, on the Judd daybed, wearing her distressed high-waisteds and purple felt floppy. You approach her slowly, stepping in time with the gentle sound waves that are emanating from the speakers in the wall—high up, in the thin, dead space, where sound travels more languidly than it does at floor level but also—the magic of great rooms—directly, straight into your cochleas, or, if you’re in a great room that’s in the town of Indio, Coachellas. You whisper something to her about differential Calculus and, without even having to clarify, she knows it’s a joke—you don’t have to waste time going backwards, trying to explain how what you just said meant one thing, not another. Does it even need to be pointed out here that double meanings are just gleaned more readily by people who are sitting or standing inside great rooms, which press on the sides of our eyeballs and into the smalls of our backs, compelling us to sit up straighter and focus more intently on those small details we might otherwise miss? I don’t think it does. 

Casually, you check to see if anyone's coming, while also trying to remember if you forgot to take your anti-anxiety medication yesterday. If only there were a way to check on that retroactively, you muse, and—almost at the corner of the Judd daybed now—you remember there is, with those plastic pill dispensers your parents use, the ones that say: M-T-W-Th-F-Sa-S. You make a note to yourself to get one and a second note to your phone to order it online before you just wing it; you sit down next to her, right there on the Judd daybed; bam; you just plop your anxious or not anxious body down, splat, into the ‘couch’/daybed-not-fireplace, because—hello? Sexy risks as well as fact-based red flags are easily dismissed in great rooms, which bolster one’s self-confidence while, also, alas, encouraging compulsive habits like gambling. But, at the end of the day, you’re always up, so it's a win-win.

In hushed tones, belying shared sensibilities, you say hi and she says hi back, and then you’re off and running—into conversations of exposed beams, window treatments, wallpaper hues, light fixtures, couch/daybed/fireplace placement and Afghan area rugs. At this point, you’re so overheated (cooked?) that you involuntarily lean into her and, in a grand, dramatic gesture, tear, with your two front teeth, the buttons right off her high-waisteds, expounding, at the same time, on the homey benefits of low-level lighting versus the institutional nature of too-bright cans. Because you’re inside a great room, she understands what you’re saying, despite how fast you’re talking and all those buttons in your mouth. “Rahmemanuel,” you say, and she correctly translates that to: “When we have our three kids, we’ll set up the teepee there, and, on that wall, we’ll hang the pictures—the real art mixed in with the kids’—in a messy way that's contained by an invisible rectangular border.”

And, as those buttons slide down your windpipe, lodging themselves, like an unwanted, non-load-bearing wall that, in non-great rooms, separates the kitchen from the dining area, into your airway, your last thoughts are good, great, even, because you’re dying in the room that represents the one we'll all eventually travel to, the room in which we’re understood and accepted and in which we understand everything and are completely accepting—the great room in the sky, which begins to come into focus now and, wouldn’t you know it, is at least a hundred feet high and whose ceiling has been painted by Michelangelo.