A Tale of Two Houses A Tale of Two Houses
Something very odd happened to me this summer when I went back to Connecticut, where I lived when my marriage and children were young. I was wandering through some back roads and decided it would be a good time to try to get myself lost. Our trek from home to Grandma's house did not require us to go "over the river and through the woods" but we did manage to find a way that was "beside the river and through the neighborhoods." The highlight of this shortcut was a gorgeous house on a corner that looked out onto Branford Harbor. We would sometimes stop and just admire the house, dreaming together that someday we'd have a gorgeous house like that one.

Fast forward to today and the other edge of the country. For those who haven't seen it, here's the house I designed and had built in Eugene, Oregon. It sometimes gets the same reaction we gave the Harbor Street house in Branford, although it's hard to know anymore. They installed a "speed hump" near our front door to "calm" the "traffic." It used to be when people hit their brakes when passing my house and there was no pet in the street, I could reliably guess somebody was wondering what possessed somebody to make a house like this one.


Eugene, Oregon

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Now, here's a photo of the Harbor Street house in Branford, Connecticut, which I hadn't seen in at least a dozen years until this summer. Can you see why my jaw dropped and I muttered out loud to nobody in my rental car "omigod"?


Branford, Connecticut

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... and now both, side-by-side:

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To see for yourself the dramatic similarities, most browswers will let you "drag" an image as a ghost to a new location. Pull either house image over the other to see how much especially the roof lines match.

Weird, huh?

Now the question is this: Did I design a house in 1997 to harken back to a favorite house in 1987, or do both houses harken back to something older and deeper, something very old and very deep, like the Greek concept of the Golden Mean?