Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)

Published Wallpaper*, August 2008 (full version)

It’s Thursday in Seattle and it’s gray. It’s been gray since Tuesday night, and it will be gray again on Friday. This particular Thursday morning, it’s gray outside but busy inside at William and Ruth True’s house. It’s a typical morning: Ruth steaming milk for her and Bill’s nine-year-old daughter Sophie, Bill checking out an emerging artist’s website, Sophie avoiding her homework. And there are the dogs, Butter and Honey. Butter’s bigger than Honey, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog where she’s a (of course) honey-colored Labradoodle. The dogs are both excited, jumping around, up and down and over, and Honey jumps up on the sofa and knocks into Sophie, holding the cup of warm steamed milk fresh from Ruth’s gleaming espresso maker, and the milk spills.

It spills onto art.

There’s a lot of art in the True house. There’s a sculpture of a guy crouching down under the stairs, and two photographs by Malerie Marder over the other stairs. There’s a Kiki Smith piece on the side table in the formal living room, and there’s a Brian Jungen on top of the cabinets in the informal kitchen. Even downstairs, in a desolate hallway that leads to the guest bedroom (itself a commissioned work of art), there’s a Claude Zervas and then, even right next to the laundry room, there’s another piece, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, by New York-based sound artist Ben Rubin of the beloved Listening Post –“We tried to buy it but there was just no way,” Bill True says – project that sat in the basement of the old pre-Piano New York Times building.

There’s a lot of art because Bill and Ruth are massive art collectors, doyennes of the Seattle scene, a scene that turns out to be both more conservative and less conservative than might be expected. There’s the great new Seattle Art Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil to bring new focus to the art through a subtle building that, rather than Bilbao-style foregrounding itself, retreats into the background. And there’s the Olympic Sculpture Park by New York landscape-loving darlings Weiss/Manfredi, crowded on weekends and a hit all the time. Bill and Ruth run Western Bridge, a non-profit gallery space that puts on shows that seem to tickle Bill’s inner enthusiast – his eyes twinkle and he smiles like  a proud parent describing how the next show, called “You Complete Me,” is all about art that needs someone to do something to it for it to “work.” They’re both -- and this is remarkable in a city where the first question anyone asks is “where are you from” – from Seattle, and they’re both so entrenched in the city’s art world that it makes sense that they’d have so much art.

The milk doesn’t spill onto a sculpture or a drawing, or a photograph or a model. The milk spills onto the coffee table, an impossibly smooth-finished white piece of work by the artist Roy McMakin. There are two of these tables, angled and slipped together so that they almost form one complete whole but leave just enough of a wedge between them to make you look and think at least twice. The couch is by Roy, too, and so are the stools that line the kitchen counter. And so are the cabinets under and over the kitchen counter, and so are the stairwells – stairs that took a day of skilled labor to install – and so are the chairs in the dining room and the dining room table, oh and the outdoor table and the coffee tables in the formal living. The comfortable chairs upstairs are Roy’s too, and the ones downstairs, big upholstered monoliths that, when you look closely enough, get down close to the floor enough, rest on circular swivels that introduce a sense of whimsical play to what at first glance looks like a grandmother’s relic.

Come to look at it, it’s all McMakin’s. The furniture, the cabinets, the walls, the windows, the doors, the layout, the circulation, the inside, the outside. The entire house.

This is a house for art, because of art, to house art.

And it is art.

The house is art because some people –cue Duchamp -- might say that it absolutely is art, and the house is art because some people – cue the defining moment when former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-covered paintings – might say that it absolutely is not. McMakin say that it is. Why? “The house is a house, which is both an object that does certain things like shelter people, etcetera, and it is also the artifact of my artistic expression,” he says. “So I don’t know what else you would cal it except art.” Bill True says that, if McMakin says it is, he says it is. “Anyone who wants to call anything art gets to,” he says. “And then we decide if it’s good or bad.” 

He and Ruth (and Sophie) have decided that it’s good. The three are happy in the house, and the house is happy with them. It reflects who they are and how they live, almost eerily perfectly. The house is a series of looping figure eights, with two stairwells on either end of a long crescent of a house – the view, ever-so-subtly, shifts a full ninety degrees even while it feels like a slow and gradual curve – and pockets of hidden doors and extra rooms and places to discover. “I’m super super interested in all these architectural things,” McMakin says when he’s asked how he approached the house – whether those architectural restrictions of program and site and AutoCAD and “must-make-this-novel” came into play. “Except I call circulation choreography.”

The Trues do dance through the house. A Wednesday evening has Ruth running out to the garden to scissor fresh basil out of the dirt, then throwing that and some chopped tomatoes and onions into a pan onto the stove that blends seamlessly into the ethereally-detailed kitchen cabinetry before anyone has even noticed she left in the first place. It has Bill circling the kitchen island, talking to one person here and another person there, effortlessly mixing and mingling. And then later that Wednesday evening it has Ruth and her older daughter and a friend playing Boggle, all crowded on McMakin’s Modern Chairs, Ruth with her knees up, feet all over what is still art, and then there’s Sophie the next morning, avoiding her homework and casually pulling up a McMakin stool, an object that, seen a few days earlier in the storied Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, seemed as precious as the Mona Lisa. Here, it just seems like a perfect fit.

“The Trues are such energetic and lively people that this house had to have two staircases,” McMakin says. “Even though it’s a not a big house – one staircase could have served it pretty well – there are a million figure eights and circles.” People slip in an out of the house constantly – the Trues say they have a fairly steady stream of overnight guests, including everyone from a Henry Museum curator who spends the night in the guest cottage out back to a writer they insist should stay in the downstairs waterbed to get the full experience.

The figure eights center around three main downstairs spaces: a formal living room detailed with a sliding picture wall that opens up onto a lawn and pulls your eye down the hill and over the lake; a formal dining room with a long table and a big blue dresser and seating for 12 made out of different-colored chairs and on top of every surface are these incredibly ornate candleholders dripping wax everywhere, and it shows once again how lived-in this house is; how even on a Wednesday afternoon before the evening bustle starts the house is full of memories of being alive, full of its identity as a home.

It’s not an accident. “It comes from this really deep place of wanting to figure out “home” and play “home,”” McMakin says. “I focus on a very core place within me, and wanting to feel like I feel a sense of home, so it’s not about the theoretical ideas.” Practically, that artistic inspiration means he designed it with a napkin sketch the night before. The artist and his two clients had been working on a renovation for an existing house on the same site, but realized that might not be the best idea: the house was sliding down that hill. By the time everyone had come around to the change of plans, they needed new plans, and fast.  “So I just spent a night thinking about it, and came over, and looked at it, and realized that the real issue was that this site has such a sense of panorama,” he says. And so everything about the design – the figure eights, the loops, the openness, the energy, and those killer picture windows – comes, originally, from that one kernel of an idea. And that one kernel of an idea came from something very personal, very philosophical, and very profound.

McMakin likes to get philosophical. Upstairs, in the master bedroom (and all the bedrooms and actually al the spaces are surprisingly small for people of such means), you can see what real luxury is: the ability to use a view on a shower. Here, luxury is the overlook, the panorama, the closeness to water and nature. And it’s also the luxury, inside, of McMakin’s having installed two types of windows in the master bedroom: Ruth wanted ones she could open, which meant a series of panels; Bill wanted an inoperable clean sweep of a view. And from her side of the bed, she got what she wanted, and vice versa. It’s a move that has, infamously, been suggested before, by Peter Eisenman in his bifurcated-bed House VI – but here that architectural theory is leavened by a deep understanding of the somewhat pedestrian fact that architecture is made for people to be in.

And, on a good day, architecture is made for specific people, and the architecture represents, translates, and narrates how those people live. “This house was about a certain exuberance and about tension,” McMakin says. “Bill and Ruth are huge supporters of the art, and I thought this house had to represent them.” The tension comes through in that, while the house is physically small, it’s profoundly extravagant. “It’s not that big of a house but it still feels over the top.”

Bill wouldn’t put it quite like that. “We got something incredibly special,” he says. “I think it’s different because no one else in this city has really taken an artist designing a house on before.” It’s not that McMakin is an untrained rube – he started his furniture production company Domestic Furniture in 1987 in LA, designed a house for a talent agent, moved to Seattle and spent some time renovating his neighbors’ kitchens (while, unknown to them, at the same time designing the interiors for the Getty Museum ), and then expanded to include Domestic Architecture – but it’s that his training is in art, not in architecture, which changes the way he approaches architecture. He has architects working for him -- Ian Butcher was responsible for the True House – and he has a Seattle workshop full of guys upholstering furniture and painting dressers and detailing bronze sculptures of McMakin’s beloved dog Joan that will become the base of a lamp that will go on a truck and make its way to New York for an opening at the Matthew Marks Gallery one and a half weeks after that Wednesday evening.

And it’s that tension between those worlds – making furniture for people who love it and want to live with it, and seeing that furniture as art, and deciding that it is art because it was made by someone who says, boldly, “I am an artist,” and having that furniture be taken from his house and his workshop, chosen and selected by the wunderkind gallerist Matthew Marks and curated into a show that, in its second-floor Chelsea gallery, looks an awful lot like Roy’s in-the-round house in the back of his studio in Seattle – that makes McMakin thrive. Using his outsider status and seeing himself as an artist frees him from the constraints that architects so often impose on themselves, or had imposed on them in the long long educational and practice process that gets them to the point of, finally, designing their own building. Throw out your first idea, you can only create beauty through pain, the architecture must engage with other architecture.

McMakin’s drawings look almost childlike at times – his houses have windows and peaked roofs and articulated chimneys and often bright painted doors – but what they illustrate is that sense of wonder that architecture, great architecture, can inspire. His houses and his furniture reminds us that architecture doesn’t need to be dire and serious and informed by Deleuze and created out of pain and suffering and saying something that clients won’t understand but has to do with re-shaping the space matrix. McMakin’s art, which happens to take the shape of houses and dressers and tables, reminds us that objects can be beautiful, compelling, absorbing. But without people, without lives, and without hopes, dreams, and memories, a table is just a table, a house just a house. When you add that layer, and tell that story, that’s when these moments become art, that’s when a building becomes architecture, and that’s when architecture creates a home.

There’s a lot of art because Bill and Ruth are massive art collectors, doyennes of the Seattle scene, a scene that turns out to be both more conservative and less conservative than might be expected. There’s the great new Seattle Art Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil to bring new focus to the art through a subtle building that, rather than Bilbao-style foregrounding itself, retreats into the background. And there’s the Olympic Sculpture Park by New York landscape-loving darlings Weiss/Manfredi, crowded on weekends and a hit all the time. Bill and Ruth run Western Bridge, a non-profit gallery space that puts on shows that seem to tickle Bill’s inner enthusiast – his eyes twinkle and he smiles like  a proud parent describing how the next show, called “You Complete Me,” is all about art that needs someone to do something to it for it to “work.” They’re both -- and this is remarkable in a city where the first question anyone asks is “where are you from” – from Seattle, and they’re both so entrenched in the city’s art world that it makes sense that they’d have so much art.

The milk doesn’t spill onto a sculpture or a drawing, or a photograph or a model. The milk spills onto the coffee table, an impossibly smooth-finished white piece of work by the artist Roy McMakin. There are two of these tables, angled and slipped together so that they almost form one complete whole but leave just enough of a wedge between them to make you look and think at least twice. The couch is by Roy, too, and so are the stools that line the kitchen counter. And so are the cabinets under and over the kitchen counter, and so are the stairwells – stairs that took a day of skilled labor to install – and so are the chairs in the dining room and the dining room table, oh and the outdoor table and the coffee tables in the formal living. The comfortable chairs upstairs are Roy’s too, and the ones downstairs, big upholstered monoliths that, when you look closely enough, get down close to the floor enough, rest on circular swivels that introduce a sense of whimsical play to what at first glance looks like a grandmother’s relic.

Come to look at it, it’s all McMakin’s. The furniture, the cabinets, the walls, the windows, the doors, the layout, the circulation, the inside, the outside. The entire house.

This is a house for art, because of art, to house art.

And it is art.

The house is art because some people –cue Duchamp -- might say that it absolutely is art, and the house is art because some people – cue the defining moment when former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-covered paintings – might say that it absolutely is not. McMakin say that it is. Why? “The house is a house, which is both an object that does certain things like shelter people, etcetera, and it is also the artifact of my artistic expression,” he says. “So I don’t know what else you would cal it except art.” Bill True says that, if McMakin says it is, he says it is. “Anyone who wants to call anything art gets to,” he says. “And then we decide if it’s good or bad.” 

He and Ruth (and Sophie) have decided that it’s good. The three are happy in the house, and the house is happy with them. It reflects who they are and how they live, almost eerily perfectly. The house is a series of looping figure eights, with two stairwells on either end of a long crescent of a house – the view, ever-so-subtly, shifts a full ninety degrees even while it feels like a slow and gradual curve – and pockets of hidden doors and extra rooms and places to discover. “I’m super super interested in all these architectural things,” McMakin says when he’s asked how he approached the house – whether those architectural restrictions of program and site and AutoCAD and “must-make-this-novel” came into play. “Except I call circulation choreography.”

The Trues do dance through the house. A Wednesday evening has Ruth running out to the garden to scissor fresh basil out of the dirt, then throwing that and some chopped tomatoes and onions into a pan onto the stove that blends seamlessly into the ethereally-detailed kitchen cabinetry before anyone has even noticed she left in the first place. It has Bill circling the kitchen island, talking to one person here and another person there, effortlessly mixing and mingling. And then later that Wednesday evening it has Ruth and her older daughter and a friend playing Boggle, all crowded on McMakin’s Modern Chairs, Ruth with her knees up, feet all over what is still art, and then there’s Sophie the next morning, avoiding her homework and casually pulling up a McMakin stool, an object that, seen a few days earlier in the storied Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, seemed as precious as the Mona Lisa. Here, it just seems like a perfect fit.

“The Trues are such energetic and lively people that this house had to have two staircases,” McMakin says. “Even though it’s a not a big house – one staircase could have served it pretty well – there are a million figure eights and circles.” People slip in an out of the house constantly – the Trues say they have a fairly steady stream of overnight guests, including everyone from a Henry Museum curator who spends the night in the guest cottage out back to a writer they insist should stay in the downstairs waterbed to get the full experience.

The figure eights center around three main downstairs spaces: a formal living room detailed with a sliding picture wall that opens up onto a lawn and pulls your eye down the hill and over the lake; a formal dining room with a long table and a big blue dresser and seating for 12 made out of different-colored chairs and on top of every surface are these incredibly ornate candleholders dripping wax everywhere, and it shows once again how lived-in this house is; how even on a Wednesday afternoon before the evening bustle starts the house is full of memories of being alive, full of its identity as a home.

It’s not an accident. “It comes from this really deep place of wanting to figure out “home” and play “home,”” McMakin says. “I focus on a very core place within me, and wanting to feel like I feel a sense of home, so it’s not about the theoretical ideas.” Practically, that artistic inspiration means he designed it with a napkin sketch the night before. The artist and his two clients had been working on a renovation for an existing house on the same site, but realized that might not be the best idea: the house was sliding down that hill. By the time everyone had come around to the change of plans, they needed new plans, and fast.  “So I just spent a night thinking about it, and came over, and looked at it, and realized that the real issue was that this site has such a sense of panorama,” he says. And so everything about the design – the figure eights, the loops, the openness, the energy, and those killer picture windows – comes, originally, from that one kernel of an idea. And that one kernel of an idea came from something very personal, very philosophical, and very profound.

McMakin likes to get philosophical. Upstairs, in the master bedroom (and all the bedrooms and actually al the spaces are surprisingly small for people of such means), you can see what real luxury is: the ability to use a view on a shower. Here, luxury is the overlook, the panorama, the closeness to water and nature. And it’s also the luxury, inside, of McMakin’s having installed two types of windows in the master bedroom: Ruth wanted ones she could open, which meant a series of panels; Bill wanted an inoperable clean sweep of a view. And from her side of the bed, she got what she wanted, and vice versa. It’s a move that has, infamously, been suggested before, by Peter Eisenman in his bifurcated-bed House VI – but here that architectural theory is leavened by a deep understanding of the somewhat pedestrian fact that architecture is made for people to be in.

And, on a good day, architecture is made for specific people, and the architecture represents, translates, and narrates how those people live. “This house was about a certain exuberance and about tension,” McMakin says. “Bill and Ruth are huge supporters of the art, and I thought this house had to represent them.” The tension comes through in that, while the house is physically small, it’s profoundly extravagant. “It’s not that big of a house but it still feels over the top.”

Bill wouldn’t put it quite like that. “We got something incredibly special,” he says. “I think it’s different because no one else in this city has really taken an artist designing a house on before.” It’s not that McMakin is an untrained rube – he started his furniture production company Domestic Furniture in 1987 in LA, designed a house for a talent agent, moved to Seattle and spent some time renovating his neighbors’ kitchens (while, unknown to them, at the same time designing the interiors for the Getty Museum ), and then expanded to include Domestic Architecture – but it’s that his training is in art, not in architecture, which changes the way he approaches architecture. He has architects working for him -- Ian Butcher was responsible for the True House – and he has a Seattle workshop full of guys upholstering furniture and painting dressers and detailing bronze sculptures of McMakin’s beloved dog Joan that will become the base of a lamp that will go on a truck and make its way to New York for an opening at the Matthew Marks Gallery one and a half weeks after that Wednesday evening.

And it’s that tension between those worlds – making furniture for people who love it and want to live with it, and seeing that furniture as art, and deciding that it is art because it was made by someone who says, boldly, “I am an artist,” and having that furniture be taken from his house and his workshop, chosen and selected by the wunderkind gallerist Matthew Marks and curated into a show that, in its second-floor Chelsea gallery, looks an awful lot like Roy’s in-the-round house in the back of his studio in Seattle – that makes McMakin thrive. Using his outsider status and seeing himself as an artist frees him from the constraints that architects so often impose on themselves, or had imposed on them in the long long educational and practice process that gets them to the point of, finally, designing their own building. Throw out your first idea, you can only create beauty through pain, the architecture must engage with other architecture.

McMakin’s drawings look almost childlike at times – his houses have windows and peaked roofs and articulated chimneys and often bright painted doors – but what they illustrate is that sense of wonder that architecture, great architecture, can inspire. His houses and his furniture reminds us that architecture doesn’t need to be dire and serious and informed by Deleuze and created out of pain and suffering and saying something that clients won’t understand but has to do with re-shaping the space matrix. McMakin’s art, which happens to take the shape of houses and dressers and tables, reminds us that objects can be beautiful, compelling, absorbing. But without people, without lives, and without hopes, dreams, and memories, a table is just a table, a house just a house. When you add that layer, and tell that story, that’s when these moments become art, that’s when a building becomes architecture, and that’s when architecture creates a home.