Hopper House

You ignore the sign that says private driveway. The narrow sandy road winds through the pine trees. The road seems longer when you know you’re trespassing. You see large houses set in the dark forests. You choose to come at night thinking it’d be easier to hide in the cloak of darkness. But in reality, the car lights make you more conspicuous at dusk. The trees start to thin out and you can see the evening clouds. On the left, a turn off for a car. You continue driving all the way to the end. You find the driveway is blocked by 2 wood rails forming an X. You park the car and step over the fence. It’s a slight slope down to a garage. The motion detectors trigger the lights and you just pray there are no security cameras.

At the end of the garage, a set of stairs emerge. You ascend and notice the stairs gradually get steeper towards the top till you reach the southeast corner of the building. There’s a strip of cobblestones at the semi exposed foundation wall. Another short flight of stairs to the left leads to an elevated entry perch on the left corner of the building. From this vantage point, a miraculous uninterrupted view of the bay opens up. Bayberry shrubs flow down to the beach and horizon.

Walking around the house you see a large deck. To the north, a really garish house. You recognize this blight on the landscape as the house that’s been covered in the newspapers. In fact, the way you found Hopper’s studio address was a news article concerning lawsuits filed against the neighbor. 15 years ago, a couple bought the Hopper property and built a 9000 sf monstrosity next door. It was so large it destroyed the view and landscape. All the surrounding neighbors wanted it demolished for violating various zoning statutes. For 6 years the house sat vacant pending lawsuits. The spouse died, the widow sold it to the current owners who promptly paid the town off $3 million to use the house plus an additional $500,000 to clear the legal fines.

There is no vegetation to hide behind. You are completely exposed on a hill. You notice the neighbor’s light is glowing bright and a car is parked in their driveway. You start thinking they are looking at you wondering what you’re doing on their property. Under the threat of surveillance you take pictures as fast as you can. A panoramic video to preserve the glimpse. You start making your way towards the entrance and walk briskly down the stair. You’re now on borrowed time.

You start to think if the neighbors call the police, how long would it take for the cops to drive down the roads and show up? With a single lane driveway, an incoming cop car would block your exit. You make a K turn on the dirt path. Your car is so long it overhangs the road and backs into bushes to turn out. On your drive out, you start mentally preparing a litany of ignorant excuses… “Sorry we didn’t know this was a private road... We got lost, we’re trying to find the beach…. Is this the way to Provincetown?” Nothing happens. Escaping without incident, you replay the scene in your mind.

You start thinking although Hopper’s house appeared to be a Cape Cod style house in volume it was very well designed. The house was kinked slightly non-parallel from the shore to create a dynamic tension between house and landscape. By running the stair diagonally to the side of the house for entry, you think Hopper is a genius for incorporating the sweeping views of the bay as part of the entry sequence. It’s a simple house that makes total logical sense. A double height painting studio that occupies over half the house's volume with large windows facing north, an entry through the kitchen on the southeast which receives morning light, a bedroom facing sunset on the south west and sculptural chimney at the center to tie all the elements together.

At home, you start reading random articles about the house to understand that which was not to be seen. You read about an artist who painted in Hopper’s cottage for 15 summers. He had befriended the owners that had bought one of his paintings in a local gallery. The most exciting thing the artist provides are photos of the inside of the house.

The wood flooring is striped in an alternating gray aged wood and dark stained pattern. Moldings on the doors are classical. Expansive views out of windows bring light to the entire house. A simple sculptural chimney forms the center and hearth of the house. The artist mentions in his writing the existence of an architectural model of Hopper’s house exhibited in Salisbury University, Maryland. He describes the model as painstakingly made. You find out the exhibition occurred sometime in 1993. Dejected, you think morbid thoughts like all the curators who put the show together are probably dead and you’ll never see the model. You start emailing random Hopper biographers who mention the model, but they don’t have the common courtesy to write you back. You enter stalker mode and start cold calling museums to see whether they have this model in their collection or not. One museum you call says they indeed have it in their collection and sends you some photos of it. Eureka you’ve struck gold.

The model is a valuable artifact. It’s like a fingerprint and a window into a designer’s soul. The model is a fossil record from the design process that reveals how the designer’s brain made decisions. Hopper’s model is no different. There are architects who paint like Corbusier, Steven Holl, and Zaha. But this is the first time you look at a painter who architected. Hopper’s model is made of painted cardboard. His loose pencil marks and notations are scribbled to indicate positions and appearances of doors. There are no cut outs for the windows in the walls of the model. Instead, all the windows are painted on the outside with a light blue color. On the interior, the attic floor, chimney, stair, furniture, painting supplies, and walls are detachable… allowing Hopper to insert interior elements into the house. The craftsmanship is crude. You imagine the 6’-6” tall Hopper hunched over a small model, cutting gluing and taping all these pieces of cardboard together. What’s as informative about the model is what is left out. Hopper didn’t model the site, the garage or the exterior stairs. These geometries and views which impressed you the most are not even documented. What’s important to Hopper is the placement of doors and walls. The sculptural chimney. For an artist who spent hours and hours meditating on buildings and painting them… when it came to designing his own house, these are the elements that he focused on in particular. Hopper’s design process regarding architecture is like his painting: hands-on, iterative, and tactile.

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Looking at the model, you start making connections between the model, photos of the house and his famous painting, Rooms by the Sea displayed in the Yale Art Gallery. Initially titled “Alias the Jumping Off Place", Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea was Hopper’s painted vision of his understanding of the world. Critic Clement Greenberg stated, "Hopper happens to be a bad painter. But if he were better, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

Rooms by the Sea 1951

Sketch for the Painting

View of Room Painted

Model of the Room during design

The painting shows the corner of Hopper’s painting room opened to a view of water. In painting, Hopper took liberties to move the setting sun to the northwest, flip the door swing, remove the bayberry hill in the foreground. Hopper wasn’t concerned with painting reality, he was concerned with distilling the scene to the raw elements of light, color, water and architecture to provoke a feeling. Painted at 70 years old Hopper sketched the view prior to painting. Two decades prior, he had modeled the house before building it. In 1933, with his wife’s inheritance money, he designed the house they would summer in for the next 40 years of his life.  The Hoppers were frugal. Their walkup apartment overlooking Washington square park in NYC had no heat and featured a communal bathroom. The Hoppers allocated what little money they had on architecture and their summer retreat.

Camel Hump. Past view from Hopper's House

When the Hoppers arrived, Truro was completely denuded of trees. The land was a barren wasteland. For 12,000 years the Wamponoag Indians roamed the same Truro area in loincloth year round… living off fish and shellfish in old growth forests. Within 200 years of their arrival the settlers cut all the trees down for firewood and building materials leaving the hills to look like camel humps. Into this scene you can imagine Hopper, the tall solitary figure walking in desolation quite alienated like a figure in one of his paintings. Something in this wasteland touched his soul and inspired him to paint. “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Renting a House - Cape Cod

When Thoreau went to walden, he had a serious mission statement. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

When we went to cape cod, our mission statement was a little more pragmatic. “we went to chatham because there was a house with a ping pong table, so if it rained or while we worked, the kids would have something to do.” I just searched for a place in chatham, called the owner Bob to reserve it with a day’s notice, and met him the following night with security deposit and week’s rent in hand.

Upon meeting bob, he pardoned himself as he put on a mask to protect himself from us new yorkers, and promptly showed us the house. I found out he had just come back from a three month stint in Thailand and Indonesia. He does landscaping work in Chatham during the summer, and has been going to south east asia for the past 20 winters. When I asked him where he stays in bali typically, he replied Ubud. It’s a touristy hub in the center of the island… so I immediately could imagine what type of traveler he was. Adventurous but not quite adventurous. On the walls of his house, pictures of his trombone band playing in chatham’s main park gazebo.

In searching for a place to stay, I didn’t know there was a ban against short term rentals in Massachusetts. It makes sense Massachusetts would want to limit migration of corona into their state. Being from new york, we were personas non gratas… purveyors of corona. Given his recent return from abroad, he may not have known about the rental restrictions. Or perhaps he knew about it, and just wanted the cash to fund his trips to indonesia.

A week later, when we tried to find other rental properties to extend our stay in cape cod further north, we received 20 rejections like this, “Massachusetts is under lockdown orders for short term rentals, which means we cannot rent out our properties until the order is lifted (hopefully in May). Visitors to the state must quarantine inside for 14 days per the governor's orders, as well.” For these law abiding residents, the fear of a $300 daily fine for renting illegally, or being blamed for hosting a deadly corona virus super spreader in their home outweighed their drive for profits. It was then we realized why Bob asked us to park our car at the bottom of the driveway when we first arrived-- so as not to arouse suspicion of his illegal short term rental activity. our orange new york license plates were not welcomed by his neighbors. Luckily for us, somehow when we searched for rentals, the first person we contacted was the only person in cape cod willing to rent short term illegally. Without this fateful unlawful transaction, none of our hikes and experiences would’ve transpired. so when we look back at our fond memories, we are thankful for bob’s avarice.

We found it eerie that in Bob’s driveway, there was a tombstone of Dr. Samuel Lord, the town's physician, who served nobly in caring for the sick before falling victim himself and dying of small pox himself on January 12, 1766. 37 people died in that epidemic. It was a reminder no matter how far we drove from nyc, there were reminders of plagues past and present everywhere. The reminders of corona virus frenzy were none so evident than the grocery stores and fish markets, where everyone wore protective masks and set up strict rules for circulating apart from each other within the stores. I was reprimanded more than once for walking callously around without a mask. I should’ve told these worry warts they had nothing to fear…. I had already gone through the engorged testicles corona fever thing. 

The other constant reminder of corona we had on our trip was that we were in cape cod in April… cape cod, till now was the memory of summers past-- the scent of sun tan lotion on beaches, long lines at roadside clamshacks, epic minigolf games, sweaty bike rides, sitting in the sand, watching baseball games, lighting bonfires, viewing seals, swimming clear fresh water kettleponds, and crabbing in tidal estuaries. Without summertime diversions, we walked the trails of cape cod and learned the essential facts of the cape. Cape Cod is only some 18,000 years old, but its history includes a vast collection of people, places and events, most from a time long faded into memory.

Chatham - Signs of our times

In the front lawn of our vacation rental, a gravestone marker,

Apparently a doctor, a son of a pastor,

He treated those small pox sick,

and succumbed to the disease himself in 1766.

The Chinese ate bats in wet markets,

Hatched corona but didn't tell the world before they spread it,

Now we have mathematically incorrect signs calling for 6 feet of separations,

Where the sides of the square are shorter than the sloped inclinations.

Seals can attract sharks,

So don't swim in the dark,

Never mind the water temperature is 43.3 degrees farenheit,

and you'd die in 20 minutes after putting up a good fight.

Lurking in the sand dunes,

is a sign warning of great white goons,

Please spare me the signage,

we're a hundred meters in from the ocean edge. 

This beach is closed for migratory birds,

including piping plovers and terns,

A bright triangular orange warning sign,

works in conjunction with a thin red line. 

We're in Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge,

the winds are strong and the waves are huge,

I'm working from 'home',

trying not to sound like i'm at the beach while i take a call as i roam.

Isn't it apparent?

A smelly toilet for men on the right and women's washroom on the left,

that this structure is a restroom,

and not a guest room?

Warning. No lifeguard on the hill,

You know the drill

No swimming no wading,

nor diving nor waterskiing

N95 masks in the sand,

corona virus trash hard to understand.

There's no one around to social distance from,

why bother wearing one?

In front of lighthouse,

commissioned by thomas jefferson,

A strange hazard sign sprouts,

"rough Danger bar"  illuminates for none.

No dogs allowed on the beach,

they take a dump off the leash,

and make a mess of people's unsuspecting sneakers.

Smelly misdemeanors.

Strong currents,

will take you out to sea,

as deterrents,

we post ugly signs as a desperate plea.

As if it wasn't enough,

We post one sign after another,

So we can stuff,

Your mind with clutter.

Please don't feed the seals,

It's harmful and illegal.

Marine mammals should make you feel nervous,

Because they feed sharks which are dangerous.

Chatham

Lighthouse

Sea

Sunset