[1] The average American household earns 42 percent more, adjusted for inflation, than it did 30 years ago, and spends nearly 70 percent more, according to the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, says Claes Johansson, a statistician for the United Nations Human Development Report, our gross domestic product per capita (i.e., average wealth) has grown by nearly 90 percent during that time, and our life span has increased by 5.2 years. “Both are indicators of a higher standard of living,” he says.

[2] Four in five Americans say they’re satisfied with their housing situation. And yet, 40 percent are actively looking for a new house, according to an Associated Press survey; and 72 percent say they can barely afford to maintain their standard of living, according to a Washington Post poll. Why the discrepancy? “People are reluctant to criticize their houses or standard of living, because to do so is to criticize themselves,” says Claus Bech-Danielsen, Ph.D., a housing researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. “Or they may be saying they’re satisfied because they’re at their financial limit.”

[3] The typical house built in the early 1900s was all about function. According to the National Association of Home Builders, it was between 700 and 1,200 square feet, stood two stories, had two or three bedrooms, and—unless it was in a city—probably lacked indoor plumbing. It was heated by a woodstove, steam boiler, or coal furnace. Only the very wealthy had air-conditioning.

[4] “People enjoy listening to rain on their roofs because, to their ancestors, that sound came with having shelter and staying dry,” says Robert Barton, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at Durham University in England. “We also biologically associate rain with bringing life in the form of food.”

[5] “Improving a home builds ties between the resident and the house,” says Bech-Danielsen. “Physical changes translate into a mental connection.” This attachment is derived from a certain neuropeptide in the brain, which carries information or a feeling to cells. This molecule differs only slightly from the one that creates attachment and love between people.

[6] Taking on the elements is symbolically important for people who are leading high-stress lives, says Clare Cooper Marcus, Ph.D., a University of California at Berkeley professor of architecture and the author of House as a Mirror of Self. “It’s an escape from the trappings of modern life at the most basic, instinctual level.”

[7] “To feel ‘at home’ simply means you can act without thinking,” says Bech-Danielsen. “It’s the feeling of comfort that comes when you control your environment, whether it’s your home, your car, or your office. There will be no surprises; you can work by routine.”

[8] “The exterior of your house represents how you see yourself fitting into society,” says Cooper Marcus. A Utah University study found that people are more likely to view a new and bigger home as a status symbol than less necessary symbols, like a luxury car or an expensive vacation.

[9] “Evolution planted inside of men the pressure to be the best fathers they can be,” says Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach. After all, those who abandon their children are left without descendants.

This Simple Palace

It’s a tiny cottage, unremarkable in every way but one: Spending time within its walls teaches a man what it means to live like a king

BY OLIVER BROUDY PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYMOND MEEKS

These hills were my grandfather’s empire, and I wanted to know them as thoroughly as he did—the name and story of every gulch and draw, and the geology below. The first step was to acquire a basic command of the terrain. The cabin sat on a ridge, just out of sight of Tinton’s northernmost structure. The porch looked over the eastern slope. Most mornings I headed west, tramping downhill through a pine grove littered with ideally straight, bone-dry walking sticks. The pines soon gave way to scrub oak crowding a trickle of water between two hills. Eventually a cattle path emerged, and after a few hundred yards, it crossed the trickle and wound upward into the neighboring hill. There the understory thinned and the tall pines rose up again out of the prairie grass scattered with mullein and fragrant tansy. Rabbits dodged amid the catapulting crickets, and once I spotted a patch of brown that eventually resolved into a brace of elk. We shared a frozen moment of threat assessment, and then they cantered off. I lost hours this way, wandering the old logging trails, burring my trouser cuffs, but always bearing in mind the compass point that would lead me home.

Once, when it was nearing sunset, I stumbled on a forest-service trail that took me to an overlook cleared by the shoestring mining operation. There, my grandfather’s empire came into full view: rolling woodlands as far as the eye could see. For a moment I felt what he must have felt, a concentric sort of euphoria binding you to the heart of your own empire, under an open sky. It was a large feeling, one that combined confidence, rapport, and dominion in a single package.

Such feelings are hard to come by in most of our lives. Our empires aren’t nearly so visible as my grandfather’s was. We glimpse them in the size of our investment portfolios or bank balances, but you can’t stand in the middle of your bank balance and watch the sun set over the decimal points. The entirety of my grandfather’s life was right here. The fruit of his work was fully evident to him, as it was to everyone. You could see it pouring off the conveyor belt. You could see it stacked in burlap sacks waiting to be trucked down to Jolly Siding, on the Burlington Line, halfway between Spearfish and Belle Fourche. He had nothing to prove to anyone. Anyone wanting to know what he was about didn’t need to look to the size of his house for clues; they could walk down to Mallory Gulch and see for themselves.

It’s not that status wasn’t important in my grandfather’s day. His house sat among five others on what was called Boss’s Row. Even today you can see that the houses on Boss’s Row are noticeably larger than the shacks on Slab Alley, where the miners lived. But in a remote mining town with no police station and no town hall, the distinction served a specific purpose: It reinforced the social order. And that, in turn, helped my grandfather get the job done. It didn’t take much—a big fireplace and a few extra square feet was enough—because everyone already knew my grandfather was the man. His leadership spoke for itself.

The same is not true for most of us today. We drive to work. The production circuits that in my grandfather’s time reached from mine to mill now reach around the globe. The bulk of our holdings are not underfoot, carpeted by pine needles, but suspended overhead somewhere in the electronic ether. We live in cities, with hundreds of thousands of others. No one knows what you do until you tell them, and even then they want to know what kind of doctor you are, what kind of executive—the kind that brings home a five-figure bonus or a six-figure bonus? The kind they want to be friends with or the kind they’d rather avoid? Until you sit down and tell them, all anyone has to go on is the size of your house, the neighborhood you live in, and maybe the kind of car you drive. In fact, you may not have any sense yourself of how successful you are, until you build a house that shows it.

On my last day in Tinton, I stopped again at my grandfather’s cabin for a final look around. The place has been picked clean by vandals over the years, but on the walls of my mother’s old room you can still see shreds of wallpaper, a red weave pattern, with a line of roses along the ceiling. It was a luxury that folks like the Tollefsons, with their hand-drawn Disney characters, couldn’t afford. The contrast
suggests a final explanation for the ardor that we pour into home building.

The fact is, the quest for comfort and security is often less a product of personal acquisitiveness or ego than a desire to provide the best for one’s loved ones.9 So the question is not what’s good enough for you, but rather what’s good enough for those you love. It’s a much more difficult question to answer, because how can you say you love someone and at the same time say that anything less than first rate will suffice?

In the course of my 10 days in the cabin, I spent many evening hours on the porch, sitting in a ravaged rocking chair, the bottom hanging out and the arms spilling fluff. It suited me fine, but would my grandfather have let his wife sit in it? And what about the rough plank floor? It supported the rocking chair well enough, but how would I feel if it gave my children splinters? The floors of my grandfather’s cottage, Chris Hills had told me, were made from imported Arkansas oak.

Each generation gives to the next. We all owe a debt to the past. The tantalite taken from these hills gave us the stainless steel that keeps our kitchen appliances from rusting. The mica gave us electrical insulators and Christmas ornaments. The feldspar replaced the jakes with porcelain flush toilets. And the lithium gave us our first antidepressant. All that my grandfather gave to his daughter, from the roses on the wall to the smooth oak floors and everything else, in turn made possible all that she later gave me. And those gifts will one day filter down to my children.

The greatest gift of all may be Tinton itself, a raw piece of the past, a place to reflect on where it all came from. Because this, too, is home. The place you come from, the place you keep returning to, even as my grandfather did, at age 92. The mine never panned out. We knew it wouldn’t. But who could begrudge him the desire to return home at the end of the day? Especially to a home as bright and spacious as this. MensHealthLiving.com/studio.