If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I'm friggin' blind

Looks like this, and cheek-by-jowl with its neighbors. Hmmm.

248 Overlook Drive, in Milbrook, hit the market today at $5.495 million. I am underwhelmed. These things are a matter of taste, of course, and I admit to being a bit of an unsophisticated philistine, but to my eye, this is a perfect example of what I’ve mentioned to my own kids: there’s a difference, or there ought to be, between a civil engineer and an architect, and that difference is artistic talent. Most architects are civil engineers, period.

Only because they’re long dead and buried do I dare mention that my aunt and her husband, wonderful people, were architects who worked for the federal government. They had exquisite taste in art in their personal lives, and their own designs were marvels in engineering but aesthetically, those designs were … well, they were civil servants. Another aunt and uncle commissioned them to build them a house in Ashford, North Carolina, with regrettable results, and my uncle Gerard, a psychiatrist and former acting dean of Sarah Lawrence who removed himself from New York (“fifty years in Scarsdale is enough for any man”, said he) to New Hampshire, ordered up a design for a consulting room for his patients in his new New Hampshire house. The result was so hideous, and so expensive, that, trapped — he couldn’t hire another architect without destroying his relationship with his sister — he built nothing, and continued to meet with the lunatics in his living room until he quit private practice entirely and moved further north to teach at Dartmouth.

It wasn’t just that experience with my own relatives that produced such a jaundiced opinion of architects. I’ve dealt with others (don’t mention Yale) both personally and professionally, and my civil engineer vs artist theory has been developed and reinforced over the decades. Again, I’ll admit that my taste is personal, and somebody else may find this Overlook Drive house to be the epitome of refined taste, and worth every penny of five million-and-a- bunch of dollars; we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Of course, I’m always willing to be enlightened:

“I see, said the blindman, and he picked up his hammer and saw”.

Barn door motif?

The range hood doesn’t improve things, and is there really any need for a frying pan to have a view? Cleaning grease off that window is going to be a pane in the ass.