Vestibule

(Note: In this new weekly column, Building Blocks, I share stories and ideas about building.  Call it “archi-texture;” I consider a structure – an “arch” (or today, a vestibule) and then I pattern it with “texture” - some  moods and feelings it evokes.  Come on in….)

“The house will tell you what it needs,” says Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.  

Our house said it needed a mudroom.

For years we had come to this house only in the summer and just for the  weekend, a few bags of food, a carefree attitude.  Our kids called it “The House in the Trees;” we drove on the dusty dirt road into the redwood forest, hiked down a dirt path to the hand-built house. The front door, as in a lot of California houses, led directly into the first room, in this case the kitchen, with no transition space from out to in.

So when we came to live here year round, with muddy feet on wet winter days, lugging a week’s worth of groceries, kids now teens with more stuff, we realized we needed a room to dump wet and dirty things, a place to store coats and boots and recycling. A buffer from wind and rain, a guard to keep the kitchen warm.  Our first year here we built the 5 by 8 foot mudroom.

The casual cabin getaway, now to be our permanent home, reminded us it liked light, and so it said we should put a big window in the mudroom looking out over the canyon. And the house said, “You’ll be inviting people to visit, tuck in a little daybed under the window.”

In other words, the room grew and became a little bigger and fancier than just a mudroom.

A favorite architecture writer Witold Rybczynski tells a similar story in The Most Beautiful House in the World, about how he set out to build a simple boat shed by the lake for weekend sailing, decided to add a bathroom, then a little workshop, a corner sleeping loft, and before he knew it he had moved in to the boat shed.

The VestibuleFor materials, we still had some of the cedar boards that my husband had used on the walls of the house. His father had milled the long rough hewn planks 70 years ago and stored them up in his barn from cedars that fell in the Washington State woods of his childhood farm. To make the new room seem part of the original house we covered the outside with the same redwood shakes, giant rough shingles, that we had sheared off old redwood stumps left on the property by loggers of a century ago. 

The house liked this old historic wood from family and frontier, and the mudroom wanted it too.

My husband is as much an aesthetic designer and builder as a functional one.  (See last week’s column Structual Choices – he loves his venustas.)  So this addition, with high light, sentimental wood, a little sleeping nook, was clearly more than just a place for rain boots and recycling bins.  It deserved a nicer name than mudroom. 

So we call it the vestibule.  That felt classier than mudroom, more architectural, a worthy name for a worthy entrance into our new yet old home.

Vestibule means entrance room, antechamber, lobby.  In church architecture the vestibule is the entrance area in the back of the church, sometimes also called a narthex.  In my days as a parish minister I remember visiting a church which was raising money to add such an entrance area.  Like so many California homes and churches, where you just come directly off the street into the living room, or the church nave, there was no break from the wind or rain, no place to catch your breath before coming in to the crowd, no place to hang your coat or drop your bags.  A layman there said to me, “We’re raising money for a vestibule.  I never heard that word before, but I know we need one.”

The word vestibule comes from the same root as vestments, “vestio”, I dress.  It’s a place for clothes, be they wet coats to hang up or your pastoral robe and stole to straighten before processing.  The word also evokes Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home; the vestibule gives a welcome entrance to the warmth and nurture of the family.  It says, “Enter here, come in out of the cold.”

Vestibules are so important we even have them inside us, in the houses known as our bodies.  In anatomy a vestibule is “any natural hollow or sinus within the body, various bodily cavities leading to another cavity (as of the ear or vagina).”

Our body vestibules have pretty much the same function as the architectural ones. The ear vestibule is the little room where sound goes from outside to in, drops a few wet things, is welcomed home.  Vertigo and other balance problems are called “vestibular disorders.”  My house’s vestibule has a few disorders – too much crap just left on the floor to deal with “later.”  Mercifully neither I nor the house has vertigo.

The vaginal vestibule, also called the vulval vestibule (love these names!) is the entrance area to both urethra and vagina.  Like Vesta’s hearth, here is a warm birth place, an entrance to new life, and a place of daily motion and blessing. 

In and into the ear, the vagina, my house, stand these little rooms, transition places, from light to dark, exterior to interior.  They are safe, sheltered, have room for stuff.  Sometimes there’s too much stuff, some pain or disorder.  But it’s the important stuff that goes in and out there. The house and the body, having told us what they wanted, both say, “Thanks, I needed that.”

All praise vestibules!

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter