Gimme Shelter: The Homes of 8 Brooklyn Professionals
When we visited writer Darin Strauss (Half a Life, More Than It Hurts You, et al.) at his home in Windsor Terrace, we were immediately struck by the comfort and ease that pervaded it. Strauss and his wife, writer Susannah Meadows, have lived in the neighborhood since 2007, when Meadows was pregnant with their identical twin boys, and they realized that a fourth-floor Park Slope walk-up was no longer ideal. The home they’ve created is full of what you’d expect from writers with young children—walls of books, a tangle of toys on a mantlepiece, an open kitchen with a large dining table surrounded by pleasantly mismatched chairs, and slips of paper bearing the inimitable artistic handiwork of young boys. Strauss works mostly from home—made easier by the fact that his children are school-age—writing and listening to music (“mostly 50s rock and 50s blues, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters”) and living a certain type of Brooklyn dream: the beautiful home, the successful, creative career. But perhaps the most notable thing about our visit to Strauss’s home had nothing to do with any specific object in the house, but rather the conversation we had with him, which touched on topics like bodegas we knew in the 90s that were really drug fronts, Munchausen’s by Proxy, Lucille Ball, and the pleasure inherent in being a 6-year-old in a superhero costume. It’s conversations like these that are the best marker of a comfortable living environment, far more than the presence of an Eames chair in the living room.
Photos by Rory Gunderson
