The Beach House Phenomenon

There is something so odd about visiting a beach house, someone else’s beach house in particular. Not a rental but some else’s private and personal beach house…

Over the Memorial Day weekend Dan and I and Dan’s mother and father and their respective significant others all converged on Dan’s older brother’s beach house. Now let me be clear that it is a very kind and generous thing that Dan’s brother John and his wife Nancy allow us to stay at their very lovely beach house. I do not mean to disparage their home in any way. I just can’t help but comment on some of the oddities of the beach house experience in general… as exemplified by our time in their house.

For instance, Dan and I were the first ones to arrive this season and we spent a couple of hours cleaning the bathrooms, wiping mildew off of the walls, picking dead roaches up off the floor and chasing the live ones from their hidey holes. The lights didn’t work in much of the living room and kitchen area. Some questionable things were discovered in the fridge. And there was a pervasive clammy, mildewy feel to everything that took quite a while to dispel. I mean, here we were in a house Much nicer and more expensive than anything we will probably ever own and I had a strong desire not to touch anything because it was “icky.”

There’s also the fact that you are plopped right down in someone else’s home—cooking, cleaning, using things—and trying to make it looks as if you were never there! You want to follow the hosts’ rules but you never know when you might be crossing some invisible line you do not mean to cross. This makes you feel a bit like you are holding your breath the whole time. “I scrubbed the black, burned on stuff off of this pan… Maybe they Liked the burned on black stuff?!” “I think there was a towel hanging over that chair when we got here but we’ve washed all the towels. Does anyone remember which towel?!”

And then there’s the décor. Beach house décor is nothing like regular house décor. A certain amount of kitsch is expected even of the really expensive houses (and don’t kid yourself, they are All really expensive down here.) For instance, this manatee mailbox outside the giant Pink house (and a slew of very expensive cars including the mandatory Hummer) is directly across from a field that seems to be home to no one but King Manatee. A $500,000 lot to house their giant fiberglass manatee in a cape? That’s hard to top.










John and Nancy’s home is quite tame in contrast, decorated in classic beach house style complete with shells and stuffed fish and hurricane lamps and expensively distressed wood and nautically themed art. There’s the mandatory and very popular deck out back with a view of the sound and their very own little dock.







And there’s also this little guy. I suppose he is meant to scare away evil spirits? I think he’s cute but some people apparently think that makes my taste quite suspect… which probably means I could make a fortune in the beach house decorating business!

After all, it’s actually vital to the vacation experience that beach houses are a bit quirky. If they were just like home, what fun would that be?