The fine old Victorian house that I call home has two bedrooms, or maybe three if I count the sunroom that I use as my home office. The sunroom was originally the house’s back porch, but at some point during the past century a previous inhabitant enclosed the porch and turned it into another room. That previous inhabitant also built an extension to the back of the house. That extension is the master bedroom now. All that adding on and building makes for an endearingly wacky aspect to both the kitchen and the smaller of the two bedrooms: both have large windows that look into the enclosed sunroom, instead of into the back yard as they no doubt did before the previous inhabitant enclosed the porch.
So the small bedroom is now an inner room, one with no window to the outside world, but only a window to the sunroom and a door that opens off the kitchen. Originally it would have been the only bedroom in a petite house. But the house grew as the years went by, acquiring not not only the back sunroom and the master bedroom but an entire downstairs apartment that back in the day was just a big storage area.
Two bedrooms—or three if you count the sunroom—and there’s just one of me. I have come up with a good use for the sunroom, having filled it with three desks and four bookcases and a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano and a snazzy computer setup and a bunch of terrific audio equipment including two turntables. My home office is a musician-geek paradise, the perfect place for a person with my particular set of passions to do his thing. Such perfection is hardly surprising, given that I developed my home office gradually, adapting it to my needs.
But I’ve never quite figured out precisely what to do with the small bedroom. It makes sense to keep it as a guest bedroom, although I have house guests but rarely. At the same time, it has come in handy over the years as a place to store stuff. From time to time I have been inspired to gussy it up, at which point it quickly shows itself as a warm, cozy little room, a perfect Snuggery of a room that just begs you to come in, put your feet up, and tuck into a book or maybe a quiet conversation. And then I let it start getting cluttered again, ignored again, and bit by bit it stops being a room and turns into a big messy closet. During those times when a kitty cat has been living here with me, the small bedroom has been the ideal place to put the litter box, since the room is out of the way and I can kind of forget it’s all there — not always the best idea from a housekeeping point of view.
But there’s no cat now (and probably won’t be for a good long time) and I have been bitten once again by the room-refit bug. So I acquired a hefty stack of new bookcases and a nice rug and some cute tables. I’ve cleaned the joint out. I’ve moved the sofa and banished a particularly hideous white plastic utility chest to a closet. I have lined two of the four walls with the new bookcases. I’m still working on filling the bookcases. I’m not using them for books. Instead, I’m using them for a cross-section of the history of audio recordings; they’ll be holding all three kinds of phonograph records. The three kinds of phonograph records are 78 rpm discs, 45 rpm discs, and LPs. To my immediate left, the bottommost shelf starts with a collection of 78s made by Alfred Hertz and the San Francisco Symphony. Moving along the bottommost shelf you then enter a long and impressive array of thick and heavy albums — still 78 rpm records — made by Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony. Many of those are blessed with spectacular artwork on the covers. Then the 78 rpm records give way to relatively more modern long-playing discs, or LPs. Quite a few of those have eye-catching covers as well. Those LPs are also made by the San Francisco Symphony, but with a variety of conductors: Pierre Monteux, Leopold Stokowski, Enrique Jordá, Seiji Ozawa, and Edo de Waart. Maestro de Waart was the last of the San Francisco Symphony conductors to have his recordings released on gramophone records. All of his successors put out digital recordings on compact discs.
Over to the side is a small set of 45 rpm recordings, all of the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Pierre Monteux. Some of those 7“ records are rare. They cost me a pretty penny to acquire. I take good care of them, just as I take very good care of those 78 rpm records and LPs. I tend to wax a bit mystic about records; to me they aren’t just flat discs that spin around and take up space. When I look at a phonograph record I see a time machine, a miraculous object that does something that was utterly impossible throughout humanity’s long history until just a little over a century ago: it grabs sound from the very air itself and preserves that sound for the future. Over the years the records got better and better at preserving the sound. But even the old ones, like the 1925 records that were made without any microphones or amplification equipment — just a needle wiggling through wax in response to sound waves — are wonderful fun to hear. They make beautiful sounds, even if those sounds are only an approximation of the San Francisco Symphony of 86 years ago.
Above the phonograph records I have filled one entire shelf with compact discs, all of them recordings of the San Francisco Symphony, and again with a variety of conductors: all of those same guys I listed above, now joined by Herbert Blomstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and the SFS’s associate conductors Edwin Outwater and Alisdair Neale.
I have a lot of San Francisco Symphony recordings.
But I also have thousands and thousands of compact discs from orchestras and conductors and musicians from all over the world. Right now it’s a challenge to find a particular CD out of my vast collection because they’re all just piled up wherever I could find a place to put them. So part of my goal with this bedroom re-do is to impose at least some order on my overwhelming assortment of CDs. I haven’t begun dealing with the CD organization yet beyond all of those San Francisco Symphony CDs. But I will.
Best of all, I have re-acquired the Snuggery that I had allowed to slip away. In this latest incarnation it’s the best Snuggery yet; the new bookcases give the room an even cozier feel than before. The rug for the floor was an happy inspiration; the room has light brown carpet and so I chose an area rug woven in lovely beige and brown patterns and just a soupçon of light green. Nature colors, in other words. My new bookcases are all white birch veneer, so their light cream tones blend well with the rest of the room. My old but comfortable convertible sofa in the room is an ivory color, so it complements all that brown and beige. The Snuggery is a study in beiges and browns. It’s an unpretentious room, simply furnished, nothing fancy. But it’s just as nice as it can be. It’s hard to imagine anybody not instinctively and immediately liking it.
I can almost hear the room sighing in relief that it has found a purpose again, a raison d’être. The primary inhabitant of this house is using the room for living purposes rather than just walking by it without a glance. After a tiring myself out rearranging phonograph records — most 78 rpm albums run a good 7 to 9 pounds each! — I have been enjoying a quiet evening reading and listening to music here in the Snuggery. The room isn’t finished. But it’s useable and will only become more so as I fill in the various blanks that need filling.
My entire Victorian house is my refuge, my custom-tailored retreat from the world, my safe harbor, my nest and recharging station and restorer. Now, smack dab in its geometric center, I have created a Snuggery, a refuge within a refuge, I suppose taking my inspiration from a Ukrainian nested doll. Already safe and sound in my two (maybe three) bedroom Victorian house, I can retreat yet further into the still sanctity of my Snuggery, closing its door to the kitchen and pulling shut the drapes over the windows that look into the sunroom. It’s like a cone of silence, an utterly peaceful place where the only disruption comes from the occasional click from the heater or one of those light rustling sounds that old houses make as their old joints expand and contract.
Thus the perfect refuge, built by a man with a keen love of solitude and a powerful nesting instinct. I spend most of my life in public, sometimes very public indeed. But I can come home to absolute stillness and a house that wraps around me like a meticulously tailored garment. I can stay, rest, and recharge — then return to my engaged and public life, restored by the protective embrace of my sanctuary.