Camp Kaufman

          I used to have dreams about grandmas house.

          Wonderous, surreal trips in which I’d find a secret passage way at the back of a deep fur filled closet, or unlock the door to a hidden treasure room by shaking the hand of the sculpted naked woman in the entry way.

          Grandma‘s house was so remarkably different from any place I ever experienced as a child. The Frank Lloyd Wright esque modernist ranch was perched on a little residential peninsula, amongst colonial beach houses with blurple hydrangeas And gravel drives.

          Every inch of the house and its contents felt like they were part of a different world than the one I usually resided in. Gone were the graphic white mullions, and crown molding, substituting them a strange geometric character, whom I found in their place in windows and wall terminations.

          Subway tiles and brick likewise were replaced with red tessellating terracotta, both sealed and polished inside, and set delicately in sand outside. These shapes and symbols felt like a magical code left behind by the builder that would reveal important secrets if cracked. 

          And I suppose I cracked something.

          These peculiar reoccurring figures were my first brush with a foreign design language, and with that, came the grand realization that the whole world in which I lived, was a designed one, with my pocket written in a language I intuitively understood.

          And thus - this place feels a fitting scene for my first chapter