La Vie en Rose: Rosslyn boathouse during a late February sunset. (Credit: Kristen Eden)
Je vois la vie en rose
I see life through rose-colored glasses — Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” – usually translated as “Life Through Rose-Colored Glasses” – inevitably, joyfully came to mind when this sexy photograph was shared with me on Facebook by an Essex friend and neighbor, Janice Koenig. It turns out the photographer, Kristen Eden, is also an Essex neighbor and, if Facebook counts, a new friend.
Kristen’s photographs (see gallery below for a few more) capture warmth and tenderness, unusual characteristics for mid-winter images of icy Lake Champlain. Even on sunny days our North Country light in February tends to by harsh and severe, so these unlikely photos were a welcome sight. They lit up Facebook prompting “likes” and comments from many local and distant fans. My downsized, watermarked versions of her photos don’t fairly do the originals justice, but you can enjoy the image above, “Ducks swimmin’ in pink lemonade” (in larger, better format) on Kristen Eden Fine Art and Photography.
Sensuous & Harsh: La Vie En Rose
Piaf, France’s “Little Sparrow”, similarly blends the sensuous and the harsh. Perhaps it’s the scratchy old recordings. Or her crushed velvet sound. Or her swooping transitions and confident refrains. Who knows? A siren’s mystery. Listen and decide for yourself.
Piaf’s song wove itself inextricably into my already Pollyanna-prone psyche during my college years, and despite the lyrics’s unlikely resonance, they remain evocative and hypnotic half a lifetime later. Piaf’s sensuous sound makes me nostalgic for the years I lived in Paris even now as I type these words about photographs that remind me how much I am enchanted with Essex, a world away from The City of Light.
Thanks for your Rose-colored Glasses
Thanks, Kristen, for your stunning photographs. And thanks, Janice, for bringing them to my attention.
Pink Green Mountain sunset (Credit: Kristen Eden)
Lake Champlain sunset in February (Credit: Kristen Eden)
Essex-Charlotte ferry dock during late February sunset (Credit: Kristen Eden)
Living Past: Paris, Rome, New York City prepared me for Essex, NY
Early in the millennium I lived in Paris and Rome for a little while. Twin hardship posts!
I shuffled back and forth on a roughly two week cycle with frequent detours to New York City to visit my then-girlfriend-now-bride. I lived out of a suitcase and a briefcase. I collected frequent flyer miles and passport stamps instead of chotchkies because they were portable and well suited to my itinerant existence.
[pullquote]As I orbited through Paris, Rome, New York City I grew accustomed to certain similarities… but it was the differences that intrigued me most.[/pullquote]
It was a frenetic time, juggling life on two continents and work in three countries. But it was an exhilarating and thoroughly intoxicating chapter of my still-young life. I was thirty years old and hungry for adventure. Needless to say, my jet-set life was indulging (and dilating) my appetite if never fully sating it.
As I orbited through Paris, Rome, New York City I grew accustomed to certain similarities (ie. all three cities encourage a cosmopolitan, lively, gastronomically diverse and culturally rich lifestyle), but it was the differences that intrigued me most.
Aside from the obvious social, cultural and linguistic differences, the way all three cities engage with their past sets them apart. All three are old — though New York and Rome bookend the age spectrum — and all three embrace their history. Architecture and urban planning are two of the most visible indications of this, and both set Rome apart.
Rome is old. Sure, all three cities can make that claim, but Rome is really old. Ancient. And while Paris reveals Roman vestiges when quaint or historically beneficial and even highlights older archeological roots clinging to the swampy banks of the Seine, so much of the grandeur of Paris dates from the mid 1800s when Napoléon III commissioned Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to renovate and modernize the squalid descendent of Lutetia Parisiorum.
[pullquote]Essex is a mere freckle on the cheek of Paris, Rome, New York City, but this charming freckle simultaneously lives in the past and the present. Comfortably, happily and willfully. Essex embraces its living past…[/pullquote]
Although Rome has periodically made efforts to modernize, there’s no escaping the city’s ancient history at every turn. New and the old are interlaced, and Romans habitually extol and condemn their ancient city in the same sentence. They bemoan the frustrations of abysmal traffic circulation, for example, and yet they pride themselves on navigating the labyrinthine quarters with alacrity, colorful language and wild gesticulation.
Romans’ love-hate relationship with history is evident in the architecture and urban planning, but it also informs their art, design, food, music and language.
I’ve been a collector, even a hoarder since childhood, but I credit Rome with awakening my fascination with the living past. One man’s artifact is a Roman’s quotidian necessity. The past is not relegated to museums or worse, the dump. It coexists and enriches the present.
New York covets the new and improved, and Paris fastidiously collects and curates the most valuable gems from the past. But Rome simultaneously lives in the past and the present. Comfortably. Happily. Willfully. In a sense, Rome is timeless for this reason. It embraces its living past.
Rosslyn (aka W.D. Ross House) circa 1822 in Essex, NY
This has been a circuitous meander to be sure, but it leads to Essex, New York, another “city” that embraces its living past. Alright, “city” is a stretch. Essex is a village, a small village. With a year-round population well under a thousand residents Essex is a mere freckle on Rome’s or Paris’ cheek. And yet this charming freckle simultaneously lives in the past and the present. Comfortably, happily and willfully. Essex embraces its living past, especially when it comes to architecture. Two centuries of heritage and life permeated by a built environment dating almost exclusively to the first half of the 19th century. Indeed many of the current residents were drawn to Essex precisely because of the historic built environment.
While my bride and I didn’t understand it at the time — seeing our transition from Manhattan to Essex primarily as a lifestyle choice — it was Rosslyn, one of the most historic structures in town, that ultimately seduced us. And it is Rosslyn that took me by the hand and guided me back through the years.
Through Paris, Rome, New York City to Essex in one meandering rumination, this is the journey through the coupling of past and present that has drawn me since purchasing Rosslyn in the summer of 2006.
I was recently accused, tenderly but definitively, of being obsessed with locale, and more precisely, with my connection to place. As a lifelong wanderer, this struck me as slightly ironic. And accurate.
By now my fixation on hyperlocality and placeness (aka the poetics of place) have become inextricably woven into the entirety of Rosslyn Redux, the robust and resilient fiber that holds it all together, or — as popularized in the parlance of contemporary talking heads — the “connective tissue” of this protracted inquiry into our decision to purchase and rehabilitate Rosslyn as a foundational platform for our small family’s life (and lifestyle) reboot.
From 1999 to 2003 I was living and working in Europe. Mostly Paris, France. But Rome, Italy had become a second base by the end of that exciting chapter, a period that started with teaching and coaching at the American School of Paris and evolved into co-founding and launching Maison Margaux, an exclusive vacation rental startup, and Margaux Europe Group, a boutique travel platform. My business partner and I had based these businesses in New York City, and this third base of my globetrotting existence became even more important in the summer of 2001 when Susan and I discovered one another and tumbled head over heals into an intoxicating transatlantic romance.
In those years I prided myself with what I had dubbed immersion travel rather than tourist travel. The Margaux Project was founded on this distinction. Deep travel. Authentic travel. Meaningful travel. Transformative travel. Human-centric vs. travel brochure scrapbook travel… My love affairs with Paris and Rome (indeed even with New York City) were complex and enriching and multifaceted. We wanted to provide a means for discerning clients to experience Paris, Rome, (and eventually Barcelona, intended at the time to become our third property) with the nuanced richness; genuine, unadulterated texture; and personal intimacy that we had both come to appreciate.
But I was a committed and unabashed global nomad. By choice. By conviction. The dissonance didn’t really phase me at the time!
Wanderlust vs. Connection to Place
This fundamental duality — a peripatetic wanderer drawn to unique locales and connection to place — is at the heart of the thread I call Wanderlust to Houselust. I’ve learned through our Rosslyn years that I am both migratory and rooted. For many years I understood myself as a perennial vagabond, and I celebrated the carefreedom and independence that my work/life amalgam allowed.
But building a loving family and a profoundly fulfilling lifestyle around placeness (Rosslyn, Essex, Lake Champlain, the Adirondacks, the North Country,..) has taught me how important community and connection to place are to me. It’s also helped me understand that I’m not either/or… not nomad OR potted plant.
Life, my life, is more complex than I’d understood despite developing Maison Margaux and Margaux Europe Group around the philosophy of immersion travel — journeying more authentically and meaningfully, interacting rather than travel-skimming. Certainly my need for connection to place was there, but I didn’t recognize what it was. Now I do. And I understand that the meaningful authenticity, the human-to-human interaction, the belonging that had drawn me to a specific type of travel was precisely what fueled my early enthusiasm for living in Essex. It was connection to place that had always enticed me. I just didn’t know it.
Starting in about 2003 I initiated an unfocused real estate hunt for a “fixer-upper” in the Adirondacks’ Champlain Valley. I’d returned from four years in Europe with enough savings to justify some idle time, a reprieve I hoped to plough into a long languishing novel while tinkering with the vestiges of a web-based business I’d launched in Paris a few years before.
But I couldn’t shake the renovation bug that had bitten me quite unexpectedly while bringing a luxury vacation rental to market in Paris’ Faubourg St. Germaine.
I’d made it into my early thirties without owning a home due to my intentionally peripatetic lifestyle, and despite an aesthete’s appetite for buildings and furnishing and gardens, I hadn’t the least interest in settling down. No biological clock ticking. No nesting instinct. No yen for taxes and maintenance and burst pipes and snow shoveling. No desire whatsoever for the trappings of a settled, domestic life. I understood why it appealed to others, but for me the commitments and encumbrances far outweighed the pride and financial wisdom of home ownership.
Until recently.
Something had changed, and I couldn’t quite figure out how or why.
I’d spent the better part of a year and a half immersed in the acquisition, renovation and marketing of a grand Haussmannian property that promised tourists an opportunity to enjoy Paris à la Parisienne. My business partner and I joked that it was “Versailles in the heart of Paris”, which was a gross exaggeration, but fifteen foot ceilings, 3,200+ square feet of living space including three master suites, a grande salon, a petite salon and a formal dining room invited exaggeration. Magnificent marble fireplaces, intricate plaster moldings, hardwood floors and meticulous finish details exuded Parisian elegance by the time we started booking the accommodation, but it hadn’t always looked so inviting.
The property underwent a top-to-bottom transformation between the day we received the key and the day we shot the photographs for our brochures and website. Half of the property had been gutted and rebuilt from scratch. One bathroom was remodeled and two new bathrooms were created from scratch. Walls were moved, electrical systems were rewired. Carpets were ripped out and herringbone hardwood floors were hand sanded and resealed. Magnificent crown moldings were painstakingly restored, and sconces, chandeliers, and period hardware were refinished.
No architect. No designer. No engineer. Just outsized self confidence and a hepped up learning curve. I scribbled construction drawings on walls and fumbled through French and Portuguese until contractors seemed to understand what I wanted. With the Lebanese contractors I gesticulated, made funny sound effects and scribbled some more. That we completed the project at all was a miracle. That the results were exquisite, a mystery that still awes me. Though I’d grown up assisting my parents with a couple of renovation projects, I’d never before undertaken anything so ambitious or complex. Or so rewarding.
Although our business plan involved duplicating the process in Italy and in Spain, the woman I’d been dating for two years lived in New York City, and after two years of cycling through Paris, Rome and Manhattan on a roughly two week cycle, I opted to trade the business for the woman I loved. I dissolved my interest in the business, packed up my apartments in Paris and Rome, and moved back to the United States.
