The Apartment
We did it. We finished the apartment. Renovations have been completed, walls have been painted, and art has been distributed.
This is our safe haven, our sanctuary, our respite from travel. Now, when we’re on the downside of a visit and discussing where to go next, Home is an option. Rather than perpetual travel until we break, which had been the previous model, we’re looking at nine months of travel broken up by three months of Home in Chicago.
At least that’s our starting offer. The entire point of this escapade is that we don’t know what we’re doing, so we’ll pivot as new facts on the ground suggest new approaches. Will nine-and-three be our final model? Who knows? Maybe we’ll settle into six-and-six, or three-and-nine. Dunno. We’re going to set out, knowing we now have a safety valve to trigger, and see what happens.
The Apartment
The apartment is in a hospital that had been converted to residential units in 2000. It’s a solid five-story elevator building with surprisingly useful amenities and reasonable monthly HOA fees. For our fees we get: hot water, cable, high-speed internet, a mail room for parcels, two fairly well appointed exercise rooms (including rowing machines, so I don’t have to find room in the apartment for my rowing machine), a covered parking space, nicely landscaped grounds, and a spacious 8’x18′ temperature controlled storage unit in the basement.
The apartment itself is a modest ~ 1,100 square feet with two bedrooms and a single bathroom. It has a slightly industrial ambiance, with concrete ceiling beams and exposed ducting. The master bedroom has a generous walk-in closet, and the main living area is open plan, with the kitchen, dining area, and living room all sharing a large space. It’s how we designed our St. Louis apartment, so it’s a style we really like.
Even though our last apartment was measurably larger, about 1,500 square feet, this apartment feels as big, or bigger. A lot of the square footage in our previous digs was taken up by the massive open plan living room/dining room/kitchen. It felt enormous because it was, but I don’t know that it had more usable space than we currently have. Everything was just further apart.
Here, that open plan area has been compressed, but we have just as much living room and dining room as before. The kitchen is noticeably smaller, but some of our changes have mitigated that. As a bonus, the compression of the common area also created enough room for a second bedroom, so Dorothy has a fully equipped workroom. We’ve just had to pretend we’re living on a boat and make every cubic inch count. As a result, it feels more spacious than it should.
But the highlight of the apartment is the North-facing view. We’re pointed right at the downtown skyline and Navy Pier, so we’re line of sight to the regular summer fireworks displays. We’re right at the tree line, so we have a leafy, green panorama, and the 5’x10′ balcony permits not just warm evenings but also offers BirbTV™. We have a birb feeder, and we spend hours happily watching BirbTV™.
Would you like a tour? Home would love the opportunity to show off.
Le Foyer
That’s French.
The front door opened onto a narrow path to the living area, with the small bedroom just to the right and the bathroom off to the left. Straight ahead was a small coat closet. The path from the front door to the living area felt like a tunnel.
This is what it looked like looking towards the door.
So we removed the wall, turning the closet into a niche. That widened the visual pathway to make the entrance seem less claustrophobic.
Which also left a trench in the floor. This was when we discovered that the walls in the unit had been set down to the original hospital concrete floors, but the flooring had been built up. We lost a wall but gained a hole.
Our other renovations seemed more obvious. This seemed a little weird, but the end result, with the view on entry opening up to the living area, is a shockingly substantial improvement.
That’s a very inviting view. 
This is a welcome mat from Letterfolk. You create the design with silicone hexes. Fish and flowers by me. 
The entry to the bathroom on the left. Washer and dryer behind the curtain. 
Top left is a piece by my grand-niece, Kayla. Below that is a woodcut print from Oaxaca. In the middle is a Mexican glass heart. Top right is from a Marrakech design group called Wafl Design, who refer to their work as “brandalism,” and the bottom right is a print we picked up at a graphic collective in Havana. 
The entrance to the small bedroom, Dorothy’s workroom, on the right. 
The alcove that had been a closet. On the left is a déblé, a Senufo rhythm pounder from Côte d’Ivoire, and on the right is Maximón, a Mayan household protector. Maximón joined us on our first trip to Guatemala in 1985, and he has taken excellent care of us ever since. Above him is a hand-cut brass lamp we got in Marrakesh. 
A treated photograph of St. Louis artist Christa Denney’s daughter’s communion dress. 
A “Mechanical Picture” by Ann Wood & Dean Lucker. Hanky Boy has a lever on the right side, and when you press it the bird drops down and reveals a new treasure behind the handkerchief. It’s magic! 
A Mexican tin candelabra. It looks amazing all lit up. 
One of only a few family photos we have up. The little girl on the right is my maternal grandmother, Mae. She, her older brother, and her parents had emigrated from Ukraine to San Francisco just in time for the 1906 earthquake. This photo was taken in the tent city set up for refugees in Golden Gate Park.
The Workroom
Having an extra bedroom provided Dorothy a dedicated work space.
Among others, two MacCorkles (the Pink Squirrel and unusually large heart), and a Nevelow (that’s Ruby’s lemur on the bottom right). 
An original design for an Ice Capades costume, likewise rescued. 
One of Dorothy’s mood boards. This one has traveled with us for about 25 years. 
The John Singer Sargent on the right is the only poster we own. The pieces on the right are all original costume designs. The two in the middle are from a Hamlet Dorothy worked on at the Old Globe in San Diego, and the two on the far left were rescued by Dorothy when she was the Shop Mistress at Eaves-Brooks in NYC.
The only change we made to this space was to add a track for overhead lighting. Like the rest of the apartment, this room was dark.
While there’s some fabric still stored in the basement, there is a surprising amount stored under the gracious 6′ x 4′ cutting table. She has a gravity feed iron, a primary sewing station, a serger station, and a dress form in her size. There is no happier sound in our home than the sound of a sewing machine.
There’s even enough room between the cutting table and closet to unfold our full-size guest mattress. Luxe accommodations!
The Living Area
This is where the action is: living room, dining room, and kitchen, all mashed up together in a common space. This is also where we made the most changes.
Living Room
Lighting
First, the room was dramatically underlit. The entire living room/dining room area had an adorable little 3′ track section, providing a fraction of the light necessary. The apartment was dark. We extended that track across the room, so it now provides lighting for the living room, dining room, and the art walls.
We did something a little different with the lighting here than in our last St. Louis apartment. There we set up multiple smart lighting circuits, so that we could use light to define spaces in the open plan space. We want to do the same thing here, but we’re not building from scratch, like we did in St. Louis, so we had to be clever to avoid ridiculous electrician bills.
We just have three tracks in the whole space: one covering the entry and Dorothy’s workroom, one for the kitchen, and one for the living room/dining room. Instead of smart circuits we’re using smart bulbs (Wiz, if you’re interested). Now we’re not constrained by the physical circuits, we can use the smart bulbs to create as many logical circuits as we like.
For example, the track in the living area has ten lamps. Three are part of a Living Room group, three are part of a Dining Room group, and four are part of the group which lights art on the walls, which also has lamps on the kitchen track. Dorothy’s workroom has two lamps in the track and another smart bulb in a gooseneck at her sewing station, all of which can be triggered as part of the same logical circuit. You can put in magnetic wall switches that can control any group you want, you can trigger them through an app, or you can voice control them through Alexa, which is what we usually do. It’s great when you have your hands in food prep and realize that you need more light to just holler for it.
As a final bonus, you have granular control over how the lights fade on and off, their color, 100 steps of fade, and their color temperature. We’ve set the Living Room lamps to warm and the Kitchen and Dining Room to daylight, for example, but that’s all easy to modify, even by voice. “Set dining room to warm at 75%.” Yes, sir.
Fireplace
The living room featured a non-working gas fireplace that was taking up useful space and preventing a seating configuration focused on the view. It was non-working because it was unvented, and my sister, who’d owned the apartment before us, decommissioned the gas. Because who in their right mind would turn on an unvented gas fireplace? So we had to pull that out and remove the conspicuous black gas pipe that supplied it and spanned the living room ceiling.
It seemed stupid on paper, as the fireplace was a 2′ x 6′ installation, and reclaiming all of 12 square feet seemed kind of ridiculous, relative to the cost and hassle. But, like the closet wall we removed, it made a surprising difference. Also like that wall, it left a lovely hole in the floor.
Tony, our carpenter/handyman/savior/artist enjoying the demolition. Because breaking things is fun. 
It made some mess… 
But it was totally worth it. The space is wide open now.
Interestingly, the blue we chose for the walls is not precisely the Majorelle Blue we saw in Marrakech. But it’s mighty damned close.
Without the fireplace, we can orient the seating area around the north-facing window. 
Where we can watch the birbs. 
We added curtains Dorothy made from fabric we bought in the Medina in Sousse, Tunisia. I thought we were adding to the neighborhood ambiance as the new Naked Neighbors, but reasonable people disagreed. 
The table in the middle is a Sisyphus, a programmable contraption that drags a metal ball through sand to create patterns. 
The end table by the sofa is our most recent purchase, from our visit to DTour in Wisconsin. It’s by local sculptor and raconteur David Timberlake. 
The painting on the right is by Jon Hammer, one of my best buds from our New York days. When I was at DC Comics I published two books by Jon for Piranha Press: The Drowned Girl (still one of my all time favorite books I published) and Nation of Snitches. The piece on the left is called Red Squares, a resin and paint concoction by Jessica Lemberg that we picked up at a craft fair in St. Louis. 
A lot of the art we’ve collected has been folk art, as opposed to art gallery art. This is one of the few exceptions, a piece called Nagapie by felt artist Zoe Williams. We’d been following her for years before we saved up enough to buy a small piece. Nagapie lovingly straddles the line between adorable and creepy, a sweet spot for us. 
On the left is a painting we picked up at a second-hand shop in St. Louis. It’s called Kringle Cats by Dorothy Bartholemy, and it came with an entry ticket for a local art fair in 1955. On the right is Dewi Sri, the Indonesian goddess of rice and fertility. Mostly we’re hoping for rice.
The Sisyphus table, in action.
Dining Room
The dining room isn’t a separate room, just a space defined by furniture and lighting. It’s pretty full.
Looking from the living room area. 
That’s the north facing wall, the only wall with windows. 
Looming over the glass cabinet is a painting we picked up at auction for $20, because I think we were the only bid. On the back it says “The ‘Cats For Great America Fund’ in Acton,” with a scrawled signature. Now you know what we know. 
Assorted mostly ceramics from all over. 
Stepping up the tansu. This is a nkisi from the Congo. We call him Mayumbe, although we don’t know for a fact that that’s his geographical origin. Nkisi are objects which are inhabited by spirits. When an ill of whatever sort needs to be addressed, the nganga, or spiritual advisor, will drive a piece of metal into the nkisi to activate it. Each nail in Mayumbe is a prayer, a request for help. We were told that the most powerful charms were sealed in the pocket in his belly and covered with a mirror. When the nkisi has been used up, the charms are removed to fuel the next nkisi. If you find a nkisi with its mirror intact, it’s been stolen. 
A Haitian beaded bottle representing Yemaya, the ocean orisha. On the right is one of two ceramic pieces we bought at a St. Louis art fair by William Kidd, who specializes in organic shapes and textures. 
A ridiculously dense ceramic tile we picked up in Kapdokya. 
Speaking of ridiculously dense, this is a Berber silver filagree cigarette case. Dorothy fell in love with it, justifiably, as it was the finest example of the filagree work we’d seen. She passed on it in a fit of self abnegation, as she thought it was too expensive. So I snuck back to the Tunis Medina one day to grab it. I hid it in the luggage for months before finally delivering it in Chicago. 
A beaded rooster, because a house is not a home without beaded fowl. I picked it up at the gift shop of the Mingei Museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park. Which is, not for nothing, the best museum gift shop ever. 
This had belonged to my brother, went to my mother when he died, and came to me when she died. I’d always thought this was a haute slice of German Expressionism, but it turns out it’s from the 80s by an artist named Mirielle Kramer. It’s an aquatint etching called My First Tango. 
Around the corner from the tansu. 
A woodcut print from Oaxaca. 
This is a custom piece created by glass artist Sarah Vaughn. We found her at a show in St. Louis and fell in love with her technique for getting the glass to form these organic, almost fractal shapes as it cooled. She had created them for her just completed BFA thesis, and we were her first commission. She came to our house and created a site-specific piece for us. Thankfully, it’s been flexible enough to work in other sites. This is its third installation, and one of the ways we most identify our space as home. 
An amusing bit of kinetic art called a Hypercube. Using mirrors and LEDs it creates an infinite visual space, no matter which direction you peer into it. 
An original Huichol yarn and beeswax painting by renowned artist Raymundo de la Rosa. In pencil on the back, in Spanish, it says: “To the god who shot his arrow for the first time here on earth, may these offerings remain forever, always praised by song.” I think. The combination of pencilled text and Google Translate is exciting. 
One of our very first art purchases, and until recently still the most expensive piece we’d bought. It’s a Haitian beaded Vodou flag, and there may be some artist’s attribution on the back, but it’s sealed up. The front says Gran Bois o Pier, which Google Translate says might mean Big Forest or Stone. We’ve always called him Big Daddy Of The Woods. Because Google didn’t exist when he entered our home. 
On our first trip to Oaxaca in 2019, we found amazing wood carved alebrijes in one of the winter markets, so decided to take a day trip to San Martin Tilcajete, the nearby village that’s Alebrije Central. There we found the studio of Victor Fabián, and fell in love with the delicacy of his work. You can imagine the excitement of getting this bad boy home safely. 
An elegant Mexican Catrina. 
A carved wooden Mexican heart in a tire frame from Marrakech. 
A Mexican iron cruz. 
An assortment of ceramic bowls. The live edge bookshelf we had commissioned for our apartment in St. Louis, but it fits here just fine. 
An antique Guatemalan bat mask, an Anatolian horsehair fired ceramic, and a Colombian bowl. 
This little device is called Time Since Launch. Like Scott Thrift’s clocks, it’s a different way to think about time. In this case, the timepiece counts forward from whenever you pull its pin. Engineered to outlive you, it’s meant to be a constant reminder of whatever transition you commemorated by triggering it. We pulled the pin when we started our travels, as of this photo 754 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes, and 54 seconds ago. 
A beaded Yoruban chief’s hat, known as an Oba’s Crown.
This is it, the OG, the very first piece of folk art we purchased, which set us on this long, winding path. We were both ridiculously hung over one day when we wandered into a little folk art shop in the East Village, long before this stuff was cool and collected. We looked at it, looked at each other, and asked, “Do you see that, too?” Since we both saw it, we bought it, brought it home, and named it Santa Tequila, the Patron Saint of Roaring Hangovers. This is an original piece by Pedro Linares, the literal inventor of the dream creatures he named alebrijes. The Victor Fabian porcupine wouldn’t exist without Pedro Linares. We are proud to be Santa Tequila’s caretaker.
By the way, he does stand up, but putting all his weight on his papier-mâché toes is a bad idea. Dude has some years on him.
The Kitchen
The industrial ambiance shows through here, with the concrete open beam ceiling and the exposed duct. The second bedroom, Dorothy’s workroom, is just behind the kitchen.
We added lighting in this area. There was a short section of track lighting, but it was on the beam that was exactly between the island and countertop, meaning that whichever direction you faced the light would be behind your head and you’d be working in shadow. So we moved that track over the island, and added the gooseneck lamps over the sink and stove. No more shadow.
There was an unvented gas range, so that needed to be replaced with an electric induction range, and the new electric line to run it. We took down the upper cabinets because they loom unattractively, they use wall space that would best be allocated to art, and we can’t reach them with our little T-Rex arms anyway. They did, however, hold things, so we had to extend the island with additional cabinets to make up for their loss.
We took down overhead cabinets and replaced them with the glass shelves and the large mirror, which makes the space seem so much bigger. 
We added cabinets to either side of the island to replace the overhead cabinet storage. The short one on the right is another base cabinet and the wide one on the left Tony custom built to fit the space. In order to pull the mismatched cabinets together on the cheap, Dorothy wrapped the back in fabric we picked up in Mumbai on our 2018 trip. 
A Makeway marble maze. 
An assortment of ceramics from our travels. 
Most of the ceramics are from our travels, so we’ve already written about them. This little guy, however, deserves his own explanation. He’s a creation of Click Mort, the ex-Cramps guitarist who switched to grafting porcelain figurines together like a hipster Dr. Moreau. He passed away in 2017, but we were lucky enough to find his work while he was alive and it was still somewhat accessible. 
This photograph is by Xavier Nuez, a Chicago-based photographer we found at a St. Louis art fair. This series of photos was created with an ultra-long exposure, and Xavier carrying lights through the scene while dressed in black. Which I’m sure doesn’t look at all suspicious while he’s doing it. As a final touch, the photos are printed on aluminum, which just adds to their otherworldly glow. 
This is the original art for an interior spread in Ricky The Doughnut Boy, issue #7 of Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, by artist Dan Sweetman and writer Dave Louapre. BSFUC was the only ongoing title I published at Piranha Press, covering 30 fabulous issues and a pair of trade paperbacks. This piece was one of several gifts of original art from Dan. 
The wall just to the side of the kitchen. Half kitchen, half hallway, all amazing. 
Beaded and embroidered Guatemalan belts from our first visit. 
A woodcut print from Oaxaca. 
Xantolito, an etching by Mexican artist Jainite Silvestre. 
An original hand-painted retablo. The translated story: To the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe for her miraculous saving of the life of my son Rafael Cardenas, 4 years old, who was run over by a car on September 11, 1949. As a token of my gratitude and in request that he may recover his health soon, I bring you this memorial. Carmen Perez de Cardenas, November 26, 1949. Mexico City. 
A beaded Huichol mask. Sadly, no story on the back side.
The Bedroom
This is the room where we did the least work. We were going to add track, but decided that overhead lighting wasn’t strictly necessary in a bedroom. Other than paint, we pretty much left this room alone.
The print is by Robert Connett. On the right are some of the many scarves Dorothy has picked up along our travels. 
Another gift from Dan Sweetman. This is the original cover art to Where The Tarantulas Play, Volume 10 of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, one of my Piranha Press books. 
The pretty, curvy built-in shelves were custom-made by my niece, Amber, to try and work around the weird structural pillar donked in one end of the room. 
Stuffies up top. 
On the left, a superhero figure with a custom Mark head. In the middle, a vintage photo of the building we renovated on Cherokee Street in St. Louis. On the right, a ridiculously detailed plastic Ganesh from our visit to Mumbai. 
My bestie Susan MacCorkle made this collage for me. She pulled pages out of a Taschen book I have called Men’s Adventure Magazine, nothing but cover art from classic vintage men’s mags. 
A lovely chunk of petrified tree flanked on the left by Pink Elephant + Drunky McSkunky by Amanda Visell and on the right by a Jim Woodring vinyl, Mr. Bumper. 
One of the very first Kickstarters I backed, Domestic Soldiers are reading, vacuuming, and gardening. They’re watched over by a Navajo Raven by Les Herbert. 
We went to a craft fair in St. Louis and one of the couples showing had let their ~ 10-year-old daughter display some of her pieces. I regret that this is unsigned. 
Pedro Linares earned his stripes making large-scale Day of the Dead installations that recreated Posada woodcuts. We found this piece in a little shop in Cabo and instantly thought it had all the earmarks of a young Pedro, including his distinctive line work. We took it to the dealer in NY who sold us Santa Tequila and she agreed, also noting that the fused figures were extremely unusual for his work. That’s as close to an attribution as we’ve gotten. It’s called Amor por Siempre. 
You can see the unique way the two figures are fused with sand. They were both clearly holding things that have long been missing. 
My father fancied himself a photographer. I’m sure that’s the source of my artistic inclinations. This is a lovely picture he took of, I think, Century City. 
Dorothy made this when we moved from California to Rhode Island. We didn’t know anyone there and we were in corporate housing for months. I had the job that brought us there, the kids had school, and Dorothy was left alone with the voices in her head. This is what they told her to do. 
Christopher Moore is one of my favorite authors, because he’s very, very good at silly. One of his best books is A Dirty Job, in which the plot is driven by elaborately costumed animals. At the end of the book he credits the taxidermy work of Monique Motil as his inspiration. We found her work in a San Francisco gallery and were able to afford a small piece. 
Three prints we picked up on our Mumbai trip. 
Winchester, a beloved member of our family. 
A piece of Russian cleanliness propaganda we picked up at auction. 
Who wants jewelry stuck in a box? 
A print we picked up at a Havana graphics collective. 
We’ve never had a walk-in closet before, so this feel super grown-up. My niece asked me what we’d entombed all of our shoes, but that seems a little dramatic. They’re actually called “shoe boxes,” after all.
The Bathroom
This is where most of our renovation budget went. The bathtub had unusually tall sides, and while watching Dorothy, with her surgically reconstructed hips and knees, try to spider over the edge was reliable entertainment, it wasn’t a sustainable solution, so we had to pull that out and convert it into a step-in shower enclosure.
What we didn’t realize before demolishing the tiled tub enclosure was that the drain wasn’t at floor height. The drains were set above the hospital’s concrete floors, which was why the tub seemed so tall. The bottom of the bathtub had to be above the drain, and so did our shower floor.
Despite the sudden change of plans, and with many thanks to Tony, who jumped in with no prep to build the shower platform and step, we finally got our bathroom.
Step and all, a lovely end result. 
The Ganesha door handle, here used as a towel holder, came from Thieves Alley in Mumbai. The mosaic piece is from Tunisia, and is a replica of a common good luck symbol from way back in the day. 
Another ceramic from William Kidd. Our other piece is on the tansu in the dining room. 
We went out one night in Manhattan and a street vendor had a blanket full of original paintings. We wanted them all, because they were amazing, but we bought a small one that we could carry with us. When we came back for the evening he was gone, never to be seen again. 
There had been a door between the toilet room and shower room. We removed it to improve ventilation (the fan is in the toilet room) and to keep the smaller room from feeling so claustrophobic. 
This predates Santa Tequila in our lives, but it was a gift, not a purchase. My sister, Nef, spent a year in Egypt as a student when she was a mere stripling and brought this back for us. 
A hand painted LP, purchased from a street artist in Havana. 
A print from a local St. Louis artist.
The Basement
A house is not a home without a garage, and ours is a generous 8’x18′ storeroom in the basement.
And yes, the racks are tagged and numbered and the bins are labeled. Shut up. You’re just jealous that your garage isn’t this well organized.
And it’s not like we have a choice. We have to do what the voices tell us.
The apartment looks great! It’s fun to revisit some favorite art and to see the new pieces. And, you’re right, I remain envious of your storage organization. I’d love to have that particular mental health problem.
No you wouldn’t. You’d love to have someone with my disability organize your storage. That would be way better for everyone.
It looks so good! Inspired… Didn’t get to see it in person, but love that i get this little sneak peak.
Thank you. I was also sorry we didn’t get to show it off live. There will be more opportunities.
How long did you travel before deciding that you needed a “landing place”? Do you rent it while you are away? Also, I read that you are from CA so why did you choose Chicago as a place to buy an apartment.
We were on the road for two years before we decided that there were cracks in the foundation. We’d love to rent it while we travel, because it’s empty nine months of the year and we still have to pay for it while we travel. But our condo board doesn’t permit rentals for less than a year, which makes it super complicated to rent. So we don’t.
We have family in Chicago now, but the real driver was the balance of culture, amenities, transportation, and services and the cost of housing and living. We found Chicago surprisingly affordable, but with a world class culture scene that we’ll still be able to access when we’re older and less mobile.