Steve’s Place

http://ffffound.com/image/81f5d5d012a86fc4bba0ea46af44a3837898a17f

I looked for a better source of this photo but didn’t find one before I started running out of time to write.

Steven Tattersall lived in New Zealand and that gave him a familiar but exotic mystique. It also made him funny—to Karen at least. And for some reason she held the impression he was or had been a sailor, but he never had. This is his home.

Steve’s place is unusual, and part of the problem describing it is that you want to stop there and just say, “Well, you’d have to see it.” But all the pieces of Steve’s treehouse—because that’s where you go after you’ve already said ‘unusual’—are completely normal. They just aren’t combined in an expected way. Imagine a perfectly usual cabin with a hipped roof and a Queen Anne style dormer above the classically centered front door. Then float that cabin two stories above the shoreline of a good-sized pond, build in the first and second stories with tin and cedar and plywood to hold your perfectly usual cabin up, sprout an extra-tall extra bedroom out of the top of your usual cabin, and finally add a bell tower to the top of that. As time permits, cobble on some walkways and lean-outs and fashion a multi-tiered redwood party deck to hover out over the pond. Just call the whiskey barrels and teak love-seat homey embellishments.

236 words on day 821