that in the middle of the room was an enormous glass desk with a huge double-screen iMac sprawling across it, and a kind of aeronautical ergonomic chair facing the screens.
I blinked. There was something disconcerting about the way the old and new combined in this house. It wasn’t like most homes, where modern additions rubbed up alongside original features and somehow combined into a friendly, eclectic whole. Here there was a strange impression of oil and water—everything was either self-consciously original or glaringly modern, with no attempt to integrate the two.
“What a beautiful room,” I said at last, since Sandra seemed to be waiting for some kind of response. “The colors are just . . . they’re fabulous.”
Sandra smiled, jiggling Petra on her hip in a pleased sort of way.
“Thank you! Bill does all the technical layout stuff, but the interior design is mostly me. I do love that shade of teal. This particular room is really Bill’s domain, so I reined myself in, but you’ll see I’ve gone a bit to town on it in the living room. I figure, it’s my house, I don’t have to please anyone else! Come through and have a look.”
The room she led me into next was the living room she had mentioned, a cluster of deep button-backed sofas arranged in a square around a beautiful tiled fireplace. The ceiling and woodwork were the same shade of teal as the paneling in the study, but the walls themselves were startling—covered in a rich, intricate wallpaper with a design almost too convoluted to make out in deep blues, emeralds, and aquamarines. As I peered closer I saw that it was a mix of brambles and peacocks—both stylized and intertwined to the point of being practically unrecognizable. The brambles were dark green and indigo black, the peacocks iridescent blue and amethyst, their tails curling and spreading and tangling with the brambles into a kind of nightmarish labyrinth—half aviary, half briar thicket.
The design echoed the tiles around the fireplace, which were two peacocks standing tall on each side of the grate, their bodies on the bottommost tile, their tails spreading upwards. The fire itself was dead, but the room was not cold, far from it. Wrought iron Victorian radiators around the walls gave it a cozy warmth, and the sun slanted across another of the artfully faded Persian rugs. More books were strewn across a brass coffee table along with another arrangement of peonies, these ones drooping in a dry vase, but Sandra ignored them and led the way to a door on the left side of the fireplace, leading back in the direction of the kitchen.
Behind it was a much smaller oak-paneled room with a scuffed leather sofa and a TV on the far wall. It was easy to see what this room was used for—the floor was covered with discarded toys, scattered Duplo, decapitated Barbie dolls, and a partly collapsed play tent slumped in one corner. The rather dark paneled walls had been decorated with stickers and children’s drawings, even the odd crayoned scribble on the paneling itself.
“This was the old breakfast room,” Sandra said, “and it was rather gloomy, as it faces north and that pine tree blocks out a lot of the light, so we made it into a media room, but obviously the children ended up completely taking over!”
She gave a laugh and picked up a stuffed yellow banana, handing it to Petra.
“And now, to complete the circuit . . .”
She led the way through towards a second door concealed in the paneling—and again I had the feeling of tripping and finding myself in a different house entirely. We were again in the glass vault at the back of the house, but we had entered it from the opposite side. Without the big stove and the cupboards and appliances blocking the view, there was literally nothing in front of us but glass—and beyond that the landscape falling away, patched with forest and the faraway glimmer of lochs and burns. It was like there was nothing between us and the wilderness beyond. I felt that at any moment an osprey could have swooped down into our midst.
In one corner was a playpen, carpeted with jigsaw-shaped rubber mats, and I watched as Sandra plopped Petra inside with her banana and waved her hand around the walls. “This side was the old servants’ hall, back in the day, but it was riddled with dry rot and the views were much too good to be