When I was seven or eight, my aunt and uncle bought a two-story yellow brick Prairie-style house. Stylistically it looks something like this estate, which is located on the same street; the architect or builder must have been the same, but I have been unable to track down who it was.

Their house was much, much smaller than the one depicted, but I was convinced it was a bona-fide mansion. Compared to the single-story tract houses in our development, it was, but in actuality it was just a regular four-bedroom house. There was something about the proportions that gave it a grandeur beyond its size. Even as a kid, I sensed there was something preferable about a house that was designed by an architect and built by a craftsman, as opposed to one designed by committee and built with a cookie-cutter. When I was a child, though, the exterior didn’t make as much of an impression upon me as the interior. My aunt and uncle had pretty flashy taste in interior decoration.

I recall a crystal chandelier in the entry, something I had never encountered outside of a book or movie. The wide center hallway was carpeted in dark red and trimmed in dark wood. On holidays, when we visited, my aunt and uncle would greet us from the top of the stairs, he in a smoking jacket, she in hostess pajamas. (They were not wealthy socialites, just working people with a sense of theater.)

The living room featured flocked wallpaper (of course!) and red velvet Louis the Fauxteenth settees. (Those things were SO uncomfortable; the only possible way of “setting” on them was bolt upright.) Perched on the end table was one of these telephones, a reproduction, like the furniture. A fake silver Christmas tree, left up year-round some years, finished off the look. I think my aunt and uncle pretty much invented “ghetto fabulous.”

On the second floor there were laundry chutes, which I thought incredibly cool. My cousins’ bathroom had double sinks (also unknown in the hinterlands) and was tiled a Pepto Bismol pink. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my aunt and uncle had a round bed. (Apparently you can’t buy sheets for them any more; you have to use king-size flat sheets, or have them custom-made.)

Every piece of technology in that house signaled a tendency toward enthusiastic early adoption that quickly obsolesced into retro kitsch. Exhibit A: the DeLorean. Exhibit B: WebTV. But the best gadget in the house was the intercom. The main unit was built into the kitchen wall, so it must have dated back to the ’20s or ’30s. Several paddle-like toggle switches allowed you to connect to different rooms in the house. I’m not sure why the builders thought they needed an intercom, because it was a fairly compact house, but it certainly fit in with my image of the place as a palace.

Since we’ve renovated the attic, I’ve been thinking about that intercom and kicking myself for not installing one during the renovation. It is difficult to make one’s voice carry from the first floor to the third, and not always prudent to yell upstairs past sleeping babies or run up and down stairs leaving children unattended. And when I am in the midst of developing film in the basement, no one can hear me scream. Consequently, Husband and I have been getting into the habit of calling one another, cell-to-home-phone and home-to-cell, to alert each other that dinner is ready or the dog has been fed. It seems ridiculous to dial eleven numbers just to talk to someone in my own house.

So yesterday when I was shopping for the most basic kitchen phone I could find to replace our broken one, I bought a set of three intercoms. I expected them to work as well as most Radio Shack brand products I’ve tried (i.e., not at all), but they actually do the job. They look like little answering machines (remember those? I’ll bet my aunt and uncle still have one) and lack the cool factor of a built-in unit, but they’ll do. Sample conversation:

Me (third floor): Can you make me a tuna sandwich, too?

Husband (first floor): You can smell that?

Me (third floor): Of course.

Husband (first floor): You’re weird.