Although my body is still on Long Island, my mind has already taken its trip back to Europe: I started feeling excited about life in the city again, with all its pros and cons.
There's a number of things to be done to improve our Altbau apartment once we are back: we need to shuffle furniture in the kids room (Bastian was sleeping in our room till we moved to the US), we'll have to move our bookshelves from the Berliner Zimmer* to the living room, at some point buy a bigger kitchen table AND a bigger fridge (we have a very small one, I am not thinking about American sizes here).
Anyway, as long as I am here, I enjoy day dreaming about "other" houses.
We were eventually able to take the ferry from Sag Harbor to Shelter Island and from there to Greenport.
Shelter Island was, to my surprise, an architects' heaven.
On the way to the ferry to Greenport we were driving by some interesting houses.
And we stopped by this one
And we stopped by this one
Noticing the "open house" sign, I decided to take a look at this design gem.
The architect and owner (of the couple Morris-Sato Studio) showed me around.
That was indeed very kind, as my first words to him were "I am not going to buy this house, because the price is outrageous I'll be back in Europe by November, but I'd love to see it".
Morris, originally from Ireland, told me about the main purpose of his architecture being the environmentally conscious and nature connected spaces, the eco-friendly materials (still a prerogative of the rich, I must assume) and explained how everything that is a bit "strange" is defined by designers as "French ", like the French shower, which base is not separated from the rest of the bathroom floor. (I define that Japanese, oddly).
However, he didn't have to convince me of how beautiful everything was, I was already there when I saw the kitchen and living room.
I will still not be able to buy the house, but I will dream about it for a looong time.
Of course, there will be room enough for your leisure time and for guests
More on the Berliner Zimmer: basically it's a room connecting the "front house" to the "side house" or the "backyard house" (see the picture). It has only one window at the corner and it usually serves as living room or "go through" room. We use it as the children bedroom (pro: it's large enough for both, con: we have to walk through to go from our bedroom to the rest of the apartment)
