Setting up Homekeeping

Moving, whether across town or across a continent, forces examination, as everything we’ve accumulated in our home is assessed against value and effort. Everything must be considered, from rafts of wine glasses to cases of books. Value is everything from replacement cost, which must be examined against transport, to sentiment, whose value cannot be monetized. What a flood of memories objects can evoke: the print that was unearthed during an antiquing weekend, the heirloom vase from a distant relative’s breakfront, the serving platter of countless Thanksgiving dinners. But sentiment will carry most of those objects into the moving van. Much more challenging, in its way, is effort. How easy it seems, when we are watching movers disassemble our furniture, to simply buy new pieces once one has arrived at one’s new destination.

Complimentary to this, setting up a new home causes us to reexamine the basics. As I wrote last spring in popular columns about kitchen electrics and kitchen tools, whether we’ve done it once or a dozen times, setting up a home causes us to evaluate what we know and calibrate it against what is new or different and may be better. Those columns grew from outfitting a second home in Los Angeles. Doing so, I discovered how much had changed among home goods since the last time I’d set up a household, but how little had changed about the mental and emotional processes of making a home.

It is tempting to think of setting up a new home as an opportunity to shop, and that element of it must be admitted. But the nature of setting up homekeeping in Los Angeles has taught me an unexpected lesson, one that should have been obvious given the nature of the city itself. LA is grounded in the entertainment industry, and though stalwarts in suits run the city and have the secure homes that reward that stability, the industry runs on creators, and their circumstances are often as passing as the winds of poetic inspiration. From actors in town for pilot season to writers imported for a scripted show that is currently filming, many residents of the City of the Angels are transitory. It makes for interesting exchanges in the grocery store, where I myself have encountered more New Yorkers than I would anywhere except the market in Astoria.

Moreover, it makes setting up a second home not just a cottage industry in this town but an adjunct to The Industry. People can and do lease everything from a couch to a car. Box stores from Ikea to Target do good business here, supplying everything from knock-together bookshelves to kitchen goods. Interestingly, one of the surest businesses one can get into is short- and long-term storage. People come and go here, and while of course setting up homekeeping in Tinseltown is not automatically transitory, it is perfectly acceptable and understood when it is.

That said, LA has some killer real estate, and anyone who wants to settle here can have very good reason not just to stay put but to become certifiably house-proud. Bungalow districts spread along grids in both the expected areas of Hollywood and Pasadena and the less so of South and East LA. When these homes are well cared for it is evident, from the exacting devotion of the hardware on the gates to the correctness of the house paint. Beverly Hills mansions radiate the exclusivity you’ve read – actually, seen movies – about, but those citizens worked hard for those rewards. The twisty, uphill drive through Laurel Canyon affords glimpses of homes, some alarmingly close to the curves and the curbs, that drew hippies from the tighter quarters of the Bay area, while Glendale offers an immaculate, whitewashed glimpse of the California of a generation earlier.

In Hollywood, apartment buildings are either high- or low-rise. The best of these exhibit the mid-century architecture that sent Ed Ruscha to the canvas, or are the golden era bungalow courts that capture time as if in an historic still from a studio release. Rambling, post-modern buildings have arisen around such centralities as the Grove and Hollywood Boulevard. To the east, Los Feliz is the gateway to East LA with a retro groove not unlike how the East Village used to be, while to the south and west, West Hollywood is a beautifully planned and executed community of mid- and late-century apartment homes and enviable bungalows.

In the years that I’ve been coming to Los Angeles, I have progressed from visitor to part-time resident to dual resident to, eventually, full-time resident. Perhaps this is how it goes in this town that, not so long ago even against the history of the American landscape, was little more than a pass-through on the Mission trail between the Barbary Coast and Mexico. In New York City, people arrive and dig in, sometimes so intently that they may not exit the five boroughs for years at a time. That New York intensity is real, but so is the laid-back LA opposite. People arrive here, and some stay, and some don’t. After you walk past that gorgeous mid-century tilework after arriving at LAX, you arrive at the mayor’s welcome message painted across the walls of baggage claim. On behalf of the Mayor, I welcome myself to the Creative City.