20 Questions: Bob Vila

Bob Vila, the host of PBS' "This Old House," pulled up the long drive to his very old and very large house in his vintage fire-engine-red Jaguar XK-E convertible. The car, a present from his wife, was in honor of Vila's 40th birthday a few days earlier.

The house is a 125-year-old Gothic revival in a spectacular locale hidden by woods and acres of lush lawn in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Vila directed freelance writer Glenn Rifkin to the expertly renovated enclosed porch overlooking the swimming pool for their conversation.

Despite nine years of continued renovation and remodeling, Vila is ready to build his dream house and move out of this imposing structure. "I hate the idea of leaving it," he admitted, "because I hate the idea of somebody's not taking the kind of care it deserves. But I'm getting tired. It's so big. You want another glass of water? I have to walk 100 feet to get to the kitchen from here."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Describe the house in which you grew up.

[A] Vila: It would fit into this house six times. My father built it. It was your basic Forties concrete-block Miami structure, with cypress beams and planks on the front porch. It kept on growing as I was growing, and by the time I left for college, it had expanded to fill up most of the lot. I probably knew how to mix cement by the time I was ten.

2.

[Q] Playboy: How did a south Florida Cuban end up in the Back Bay of Boston, renovating houses for Yuppies and Brahmins?

[A] Vila: Life is all connections: who you meet and where you go and who asks you out to dinner. I came to Boston because the best friends I had made in the Peace Corps in Panama were going to school here. I finished the Peace Corps at 22, and I was pretty sure that I did not want to make south Florida my permanent home. I had traveled enough to know that I wanted to live in a bigger, older city.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Does your show inspire people to take on projects that they can't handle—financially, emotionally or technically?

[A] Vila: A type-A person is going to undertake something that he is incapable of handling regardless of whether or not he watches me traipse through a construction project. If anything, the program shows people that some things take a lot of time, money and talent to accomplish. We try to distinguish between what is feasible for the amateur to attempt and what should be handled only by the professional.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Did you gain TV stardom through the service entrance?

[A] Vila: I did not set out to be on television. It was just a coincidence that I got married and bought a wreck of a house in a very good neighborhood and a newspaper reporter pulled her car into the driveway, saw the renovation we were doing and put me in the newspaper. It was a further coincidence that a TV producer saw the article, came out and asked if he could shoot some video tape and interview me and then called back six months later to ask me to host a new show. I was the most embarrassed man in Boston after that first show went on the air. At the end of the season, of course, we had an Emmy.

5.

[Q] Playboy: What do you say when you whack your thumb with a hammer? And what does master carpenter Norm Abram say?

[A] Vila: I stick to "Shit." Norm probably has not whacked his thumb in a long time. Anyway, he's the kind of guy who doesn't say "Shit."

6.

[Q] Playboy: How do you build soul and personality into a house?

[A] Vila: Do what you like on the inside and, if it's an important piece of architecture, get advice on the outside. There's a current obsession with the English country house, and it's painful to see people trying to achieve that look in a ranch house.

[A] Best is when people stick to being themselves and live with things they like—weird things they've inherited and crazy things they've won at an amusement park. People should be honest about their surroundings and possessions and not create stage-sets for themselves.

7.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that you are about to build your own dream house. What will its personality be?

[A] Vila: Relatively informal. Here we are living in a house that is too big and is quite formal. We bought this house because it was practically a giveaway ten years ago. With five acres of land, it was like moving

into a private park. Now we want to live on a smaller scale, and I'm starting to create my dream house. In my mind's eye, it has rocks and stones that I can gather on the property. It has large timbers and slate and copper, the classic building materials. It does not involve any kind of fussiness—except, perhaps, for one formal room. We'll also have a big kitchen with a wood-burning stove and a huge table; at the other end, a fireplace and a TV, a place where the whole family can live together. That really appeals to me.

8.

[Q] Playboy: Explain your show's visit to Trump Tower.

[A] Vila: That episode stands out in everybody's mind, because we were looking at a $5,000,000 two-bedroom condominium; but that season, we also looked at log cabins, antique houses and floating houses in Seattle. Trump Tower was a fun place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. I like to be able to walk out my door and step on my ground.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you feel that the place was hideously overdone?

[A] Vila: I was taken aback by the level of expense and degree of ostentation. I have been in the homes of many wealthy people, but I'd never gone into a house where all the walls were covered in silk and 24-kt. gold.

10.

[Q] Playboy: What's the dumbest mistake made in renovation?

[A] Vila: The dumbest mistake is to put in $100,000 worth of renovations that price you out of the market. What good is it to buy a $75,000 house in a neighborhood of $100,000-to-$150,000 houses and then put $100,000 into it?

11.

[Q] Playboy: To viewers of the show, it sometimes seems as if you turn over the difficult chores to Norm. Do you think that's a reasonable impression?

[A] Vila: Norm is there as master carpenter. It would be inappropriate for me to stand behind him, saying, "Now do this, Norm." I actually miss the stuff we build together. I remember four years ago, we built a set of kitchen cabinets, but in the past few seasons, we've all been too involved with real-life homeowners. On the show, my role continues to be (concluded on page 163)Bob Vila(continued from page 123) that of the host, the come-on, the sit-right-down-and-watch kind of guy. I'm supposed to ask the right questions.

12.

[Q] Playboy: What is your favorite smell on a construction site?

[A] Vila: Wet wood, right after a rain.

13.

[Q] Playboy: How do you build a sensuous room?

[A] Vila: From the point of view of the architecture, you have to equate the word sensuous with the word cozy. A vast space is not a sensuous environment. Frankly, I equate the sensuousness of a room with the ability to lock the doors. But, then, I have three kids running around.

14.

[Q] Playboy: Defend vinyl siding.

[A] Vila: I'm certainly not dumping on it, but I don't see it as a product that belongs in a historic district. I would never say that vinyl siding is appropriate to put on a house that is an antique. But it's very appropriate if someone is creating a 1986 replica of a 1686 garrison. Let's face it: The economics of housing today make carefree living very important. Maintenance is expensive, and it doesn't make any sense to force people into situations where they constantly have to worry about getting the money to paint the house. There are some improvements I would refuse on aesthetic grounds, such as adding a Florida room to a perfect Federal house. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Marrying materials is another of my pet peeves. I'm a big booster for natural materials, though in today's economy, it is harder to afford them.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Could you move into a house that needed no work at all?

[A] Vila: No, I could never move into somebody else's space without personalizing it. I bought this house from a fellow who had just spent a year working on it, and it has taken me nine years to get it into close-to-terrific shape. He had—oh, God, the bedroom—he had just put up some Victorian wallpaper, a replica that was shades of green and mustard yellow, and it had a pattern that was a series of repeating plumes going up the walls. In the moonlight, it looked like giant spiders crawling across the walls. It was hideous. I always hate to remove material that somebody has spent good money on, but I couldn't live with that.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Are there opportunities in American housing today such as you encountered in Boston 13 years ago?

[A] Vila: Yes. Some are in the inner cities. Pittsburgh, for instance, has some great opportunities. In the country, Maine right now is where Cape Cod was ten years ago in terms of development and potential for turning a tidy profit.

17.

[Q] Playboy: What makes something worth saving?

[A] Vila: Has it been touched by the hand and the mind of a designer, artist, sculptor? I have a basement full of doors and dentils and an occasional mantelpiece, and every bit of it is from before 1900. In my dream house, I will incorporate a lot of it.

18.

[Q] Playboy: What's the critical element an amateur needs to get through a project?

[A] Vila: The safety zone: the ability to get out of the battlefield. That may mean checking into a motel for the weekend or going to the trouble of creating some elaborate safe zone within the project.

19.

[Q] Playboy: When other people get tense, they drink or eat or read. You move furniture. Why?

[A] Vila: It's like juggling. Sometimes you inject a new element into the way you use a room that makes you have to juggle the furniture or the books around. I may go in to look for a book and find a certain amount of disarray. Everyone's gone to bed, so I may have a brandy and spend the next hour trying to figure out why certain books ended up in a certain place, or I may move the furniture around. I do the same thing outside. If I can't swim or get exercise, I may end up building something or knocking down trees or clearing brush.

20.

[Q] Playboy: When your oldest son was three, he climbed onto the monkey bars at nursery school and shouted, "Let's build a condo!" Are you pleased with the influence you are having on your children?

[A] Vila: Yes. I just worry about making these children live up to something that may be difficult to live up to. I mean, I didn't have a daddy on television. I want them to be themselves. If they decide that they would like to live on the 30th floor of some skyscraper, that's terrific.

"If I can't swim or get exercise, I may end up building something or knocking down trees or clearing brush."