JULIAN

The house announced itself immediately.

I had been in many houses. I had the specific and particular experience of a man who had attended dinners and events and the various domestic occasions of a professional life that required the presence of homes, old money homes, new money homes, the particular and varying quality of the spaces people built to communicate who they believed themselves to be.

I read houses the way I read rooms.

The Carter house read as a particular and specific type, the type that had the surface quality of warmth and the architecture of control. The flowers were real and the furniture was good and the...