When people find out I live in Highlands Ranch, which was once described as “one big smush of beige puke,” they make faces like they’ve just had some sweat sock soup.
When I was a kid, the Smiths spent a couple of years in Uniontown, Pa., 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Uniontown is the length of a few coal trains from Bear Run, where Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar Kaufman Sr. had Frank Lloyd Wright design and build a residence for him.
At that time I didn’t know what Pittsburgh was, or who Frank Lloyd Wright was, and I don’t think anyone knew that the house Wright designed would one day be named the “best all-time work of American architecture” by members of the American Institute of Architecture.
It’s Fallingwater.
Recently, curators of the house, which has long been an unoccupied museum, announced that Fallingwater will be opened to visitors for sleepovers. Guests will spend nights in a newer four-bedroom home built on the grounds for an accountant of the family that owned the property, but during the day they will be able to dine and lounge in Fallingwater and listen to the waterfall that runs beneath the house. Yup, the house is built directly over a waterfall.
Fast forward to an art history class at UCLA when I heard my professor say something about a house in southwest Pennsylvania near Uniontown. I sat up and listened and found out we had lived a few miles from an architectural masterpiece.
Fast forward again to 1993 when I was house shopping. My finances were limited and the housing market in Denver was robust. I could have taken my allowance and purchased a yurt or a tool shed in Denver, or among other options, a new three-bedroom house in a fast growing, white-flight community in Douglas County.
For years I subscribed to Architectural Digest, and drooled over the custom homes built near oceans, and apartments on Lexington in Manhattan, getaways on an island across from Seattle, solar-powered gems in Telluride, or sanctuaries that looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had touched them.
I don’t live in my dream home or in my dream hometown, but who does? I am not an ambassador for this place. I don’t really live in Highlands Ranch, I live in my house. My employer offered senior faculty buyouts to retire. I took mine and had an in-home studio built. I have everything I need right here.
And when I need to go out, there’s a Tattered Cover and Whole Foods. We have one of the two top bakeries in metro Denver, Pierre Michel French Bakery. Smitty and I have a brilliant veterinarian, and the U.S. Postal Service has provided me with Sherri, the best mail carrier ever.
Sure, we all live in ticky-tack houses that are beige, beige and beige. But there are covenants (I know, I know), and lawns are mowed and weeds are pulled and the beiges get repainted at the HOAs’ behest.
Highlands Ranch is in Douglas Country, pretty much a red state unto itself. Douglas County was just ranked fifth in the country in concentration of households with residents ages 25-34 making more than six figures per year.
This isn’t Highland. We don’t have Duo. We have Applebee’s. We don’t have Root Down. We have Olive Garden.
I am a painter, an abstract expressionist. Seemingly being a highly trained artist and living where I do make a lot of people shake their heads.
Trust me, if I were living on Lafayette across the street from the Country Club, my work would look just the same. Classical music sounds just as good here as it would there. Netflix movies look just as good here as they would if I lived in the Museum Residences. Ironically, one of my paintings is “living” there.
And another one is living across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in midtown.
Home is where the art is.
Craig Marshall Smith (craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net) is a retired emeritus professor of art and an abstract expressionist painter.
