002 | Knickknacks in Backcountry
A short lesson on the different areas of Greenwich.
There needs to be a word in the English language that describes the feeling you get when you arrive back to your own home after visiting someone else’s far more beautiful home.
Something in between contrasto (Italian for contrast, where something feels different through comparison) and nyans (Swedish for subtle nuance, the small details you suddenly notice). Nothing changed, but you’re seeing everything differently.
Over the weekend, I visited my sweet friends that just moved. They are the first of us to ditch city life for suburbs, and not just any suburbs, Greenwich Backcountry. Greenwich is a beautiful place, the homes are massive with long driveways lined by trees. If you’re lucky to see the houses from the street, you can see the lawns are sprawling and cut all the same, so you can’t really tell where one property starts and one ends. It is manicured and perfect. I am making a generalization about Greenwich, most of it is like that to me as an outside visitor, but I know it’s quite large and the areas differ.
Greenwich, to my knowledge, is split between three main sections: Back Country, Mid-Country, and In-Town or Coastal. Backcountry, which is closest to Westchester County in New York, is very private. There are large acreages with estates and stables full of horses. Bordering that is Mid-Country Greenwich, which is more suburban and includes Stanwich Club, where I’ve gone for Christmas dinner the past few years. This is my biggest understanding of the region and I’ve been told it’s a very “classic Greenwich” suburban place. This connects on the other side to In-Town or Coastal Greenwich, which sits along the Long Island Sound. This includes Downtown, Cos Cob, and Old Greenwich. Here, life can be a bit more walkable and you have easy access to the Metro North to get into New York and I-95 for commuting, whereas Back Country is furthest from the trains and is much more quiet, secluded, and resembling a countryside more than any type of suburb I’ve been to. Backcountry is peaceful, hidden, and removed from normal life. If Downtown Greenwich yells, Backcountry whispers.
Unlike many of the Backcountry homes, my friend’s house is not an estate and there are no signs of equestrian life. It’s in the woods and is almost all glass. Their driveway is hard to find and instead of sprawling lawns surrounding the path, there are low stone walls and gardens. From inside the house, you can see there is a drop off in the back, and the stonework continues down, creating a path to the woods. Every way you turn you’re surrounded by either deep woods or bamboo, planted by the original owner of the house. To say it is stunning feels insulting, it is more than that. My friends have taken great care in preserving the landscape, spending hours and hours cleaning out the ever-expansive acreage.
Inside, their home is full of carpets from their trip to Marrakesh and pieces of Japanese art. Their furniture is curated to perfection, they both have beautiful taste. One half of the couple grew up in New Mexico and the other in Paris, right in the city. Their styles blend beautifully, although unexpectedly, and you can see that in their home. It isn’t a beige box, it isn’t a movie set. It’s warm and inviting and is straight out of a magazine. I love them together and seeing how beautifully they were able to conjoin their life in this home together makes me happy for them.
It was hard for me to not notice there were no knickknacks in their home. They gave us a tour of the whole place, inside every spare bathroom and walk-in closet, even where they keep their vacuum, and not a single knickknack was to be seen. I thought of my own home, a cobbled together one-bedroom apartment that I cherish but is far from anything I would call beautiful. If it weren’t for all the knickknacks, the apartment itself would probably fall to the ground. From my couch alone, I see four different types of bird knickknacks. One is glass, holding matches, one is plush with bunny ears from leftover Easter decor, one is wrought iron that looks like a pigeon, and one is a plastic bird driving a peanut my old roommate got me. I don’t even like birds all that much.
My apartment’s offputting nature doesn’t stop with the knickknacks. I have a great couch but it is an unfortunate one. It is the most comfortable couch you’ll ever sleep on, and many have done so. I can’t have a sectional or a pullout couch because I am in what they call a railroad apartment, which just means it’s one full floor that is very long and skinny. My couch is eight feet long and fairly deep, which can become even deeper when we take the back pillows off. It would absolutely be perfect if it wasn’t chocolate brown corduroy and far too large for the space. To spare my apartment, I won’t be sharing any more details, but I will say my friends had a large sectional all six of us could sit on with lots of room in between, plus comfortable chairs if people wanted to face the couch. I do not have any chairs other than my dining chairs and some stools I stack under my desk in case we have any visitors and I run out of dining chairs, which happens to be every time I have people over. They aren’t very comfortable.
At the end of the trip to my friend’s house, when we were wrapping up dinner, they pulled me aside and pointed up to a beam close to their ceiling. There I saw it, I finally saw a knickknack. It was the miniature cat figurine holding a fishing pole I got them last year. It was a dot of unperfect in a sea of Greenwich perfection. I had no idea how they could have gotten it up there and the thought of them discussing where to put the silly plastic figurine made me laugh. The cat figurine sat there smiling, overlooking their beautiful space just like I did all evening.