Arizona Architecture-Turret Crazy?

Our Turret Craze in Sunny Arizona
Turrets cast a fairy-tale spell on many in the Valley

Once upon a time in the Valley, there lived a deeply frustrated population.

The people loved to play dress-up with their houses, primping their communities with names such as Villagio and Tartesso, hiding their cares in turreted abodes that cast a powerful spell: You are anywhere but here.

Yes, turrets. As in castles, Rapunzel, the TomKat Italian wedding - the whole lot. In Litchfield Park and other valley areas, our houses now are wearing crowns. This is escapism as architecture, the fairy god-builder as therapist, and clearly, our inner children spent way too much time at Disneyland.

It seems there's something bewitching about coming home from the wild, workaday West and cocooning in your carefully antiqued, leather-upholstered plot of European bliss.

If you draw the shutters just so, you can't see the gravel-laden front yard, you can't see the neighbors' house that looks just like yours. You can gaze at the faux topiaries resting on your mantel, admire the family crest a muralist painted in the entry and revel in your mirage.

"The kids say, 'It's a castle! It's a castle!' " says Melissa Krainski, whose yellow McMansion sits on a man-made hill near a man-made lake in a gated Gilbert community. It has eight turrets. (Who's the fairest of them all?)

"It feels like Arizona out there," says Krainski, 29, gazing out of her breakfast-nook turret onto the water-ski lake in the backyard, "but in here it's like our own little village."

Architecture is a way that we tell the world our stories, a blueprint of a moment in the American psyche: We build nameplates, we erect adjectives, we slip in notes to posterity saying we were here. But the story we're telling now goes something like this: We were here, but don't tell anyone, OK? Because we worked very hard to persuade ourselves we lived in a different place entirely.

Ye olde ranch house
Castles, of course, are everything Arizona is not: old and fussy, posh and pedigreed. They're an architectural oxymoron in a landscape of saguaro and sparkling-new stucco, and a weird rub with a culture that considers tucking in a Tommy Bahama as dressing for dinner.

And yet there are turrets for the neighbors and the nobles alike: 1,300 turreted square feet for $159,950 in Surprise, or a Scottsdale turret for $1.1 million with a fountain in the backyard.

We have half-turrets and octagonal turrets and turrets that are 26 feet high; turret entries, turret kitchens and even turret bathrooms, with columns around the tub. Ikea is selling a round bed.

We tear down bits of our Arcadia ranch houses in Phoenix, AZ, add a turret or two, and admire the resulting 1950s-meets-1550s creation.

Of course, there are turret condos - the copper-topped Chateaux on Central located in the Central Corridor. (We say condo, they say "urban mansion.")

If you want to get all academic and idealistic about it, and someone always does, architects say this turreting is gallows-ville.

"They're absolutely abominable," says Victor Sidy, dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West.

"Invasions," says Will Bruder, the Phoenix architect. "We have the authenticity of an original horizon and landscape," he says, and we muck it up trying to drag in bits of Tuscany or old English lore, houses "where your friends from back East come and say, 'Gee, we've got this in Ohio.' "

Long live the queen
Deeper down, playing dress-up with our houses represents an amalgam of American angst. Our cultural inferiority complex with Europe runs deep: We have no royalty, so we like to play at creating our own. TomKat! Madonna! Eva Longoria! All anointed Americans, all wed in European castles.

Called the bestselling bottle of Italian wine in America, the Cavit Collection has a castle on the label, and its slogan is "elevating life." We drink up the illusion of being somewhere older, more ethereal, less manufactured American, less now.

In California's Napa Valley, wine-oriented tourists are gaga for the newest attraction - a 120,000-square-foot winery named Castello di Amorosa, or "Castle of Love" - complete with drawbridges, bricks imported from Europe, a torture chamber and turrets galore.

You can even buy a real European castle, if you want to, for around $5 million at poshjourneys.com, which is based in Reno. The hot property is a castle time share in Germany: a piece of 1710 to pass 'round.

"Historically, dating literally from George Washington, the status-laden home in America is something that evokes the English aristocracy," says Winifred Gallagher, author of House Thinking and The Power of Place.

"Washington very consciously styled Mount Vernon into his idea of a British estate. He wanted to establish that he and, by association, this country were very up-and-coming."

Mount Vernon: token turret on top.

Turrets are a kooky byproduct of globalization-meets-destination, a modern world where location is becoming a minor technicality. We have Venice in Las Vegas, and that gondola concept now has come to Macao, a special administrative region of China. Steamy Dubai boasts an indoor ski park, with 22,500 square meters of real snow all year. Even in Paris, they set up a beach along the Seine come summer. Where in the world is Matt Lauer? Who can tell?

It's also total Disney brain: We believe in magic, in creating castles and characters and lands that don't exist, and we love our illusions. Our lexicon of lovely things is steeped in fairy tales: the Kennedys and Camelot, Cinderella stories, prom kings and rodeo queens, Miss America and her crown. And we pass it on - a souvenir for the kids from the Art Institute of Chicago's gift shop: Mon Premier Chateau, or "My First Castle."

In Phoenix, there is a 17-year-old girl named Elyse Smethers, who gets to pose for prom pictures beside her family's turret. Long dress. Prince Charming. Stretch-Hummer as carriage. The luckiest girl in north-central.

The hideaway home
There's also a deeper rationale, more melancholy, less pink.

"We are not in love with our time," says Bruder, the architect. "Everybody wants nostalgia . . . a way to get us away from our feelings about things like 9/11 and Virginia Tech and all these unpleasantries that our high-speed life wraps us in."

Coming to Goodyear, AZ complete with turreted foyers: Camelot Homes' Serenity Series, peace from the $500,000s.

"Everybody is completely in a little autonomous bubble . . . these big citadels where we try to do everything at home," author Gallagher says. The home theater, the home gym, working from home, even the second home as vacation destination. We're hungry for home, home, home.

"The world is a much more dangerous place to us," she adds.

Images from the Iraq war continue to assault us. And there are shootings at malls, in churches, in college classrooms.

"It's just a world that no one would have thought possible," Gallagher says.

We don't know our neighbors, "we don't have that kind of social support, that feeling of safety internationally or even locally," she says, "so what we do, instead, is build these fortresses."

Fort Ben
"Have you ever heard of a gun turret?" wonders Ben Rogers, 32, master of his family's Chandler turret for about a year now.

"We're really into - I don't want to sound weird - emergency preparedness," Rogers explains. A gun turret is a shooting platform, high and round, a holdover from the authentic turret ages, for a sniper.

Rogers and his father-in-law were shopping for recreational weaponry one afternoon and got to thinking about what would happen if some mythic day, the world crumbled and they needed to defend their food storage from the starving populace.

"It's all kind of a joke," Rogers says, "but that was the conversation about it. We worked out all the details and everything about putting one (gun turret) into our (home's) turret," currently home to plant-filled niches, complete with spotlights, a chandelier and a stone-floor medallion that Rogers' wife adores. "

Castle 101
Before the Disneyland castle and Dora the Explorer's Magic Castle Furniture Gift Set, before the Tony Parker-Eva Longoria nuptials, castles were used to keep out the naughties.

"Castle" derives from the Latin castellum, or "fortress." The first officially anointed castles showed up in the ninth century, and there was a good reason for using those rounded walls. The Middle-Age weapon of choice was a battering ram, and rounded walls better dispersed the destructive force of the ram. When gunpowder trumped the log in the Middle Ages, castles ceased to be motivated by defense and henceforth became monuments to their masters: pretty places to live and lord over the neighborhood.

"Even going back to the pyramids, there is this sense that human life was something that was finite, and that by surrounding ourselves with something that had the illusion of permanence, you could get around that fate," says Sidy, the school of architecture dean. "I think . . . those who are building (turrets) are trying to compensate for something, or perhaps they're fearing something. It may be Arizona that they're fearing."

In her Phoenix, AZ home, Susan Eller is trying to compensate for the fact that she is not in Italy right this very minute. The universe owes her a turreted kitchen, at least.

"Everyone has rectangles," says Eller, 47. "I don't know anyone who has a kitchen that's a radius. We thought it felt very warm."

The Ellers' entire home is a psalm to other places: the David sculpture here, a map of Israel there and turrets everywhere.

"It's an oasis in the middle of the desert," she says. "It takes you away from the desert. This is a huge escape from reality."

'Kinda flashy'
As homes have become more important, they've become more expensive. Travertine floors are tired and granite countertops are overdone, so we're scrambling for ways to justify our homes' price tags. For a half-million dollars these days, it feels as if you should get a turret or at least a triple-head shower; something to say that this is a fancy, pretty house, and the people who live here have evolved beyond the stainless-steel fridge.

The turret craze, says Alex Holmquist, senior architectural manager for Maracay Homes in the Phoenix area and the man behind many a Valley turret, has been huge, a "response to the same-old, same-old entries and the same-old houses" we've been living in for ages. We're tired of fake lofts and red-tile-roofed neighborhoods named after oceans. Add a turret, he says, and "it's round, it's kinda flashy. You see it and it has a lot of pop to it."

People walk in to the models at Maracay, to a round entry where a Tuscan foyer once felt so revolutionary 15 minutes ago, and fall in love. A round room where there was square; England, where Italy stood before.

Sometimes, Holmquist says, the people refer to their turrets as rocket ships. Interplanetary escapism; revolutionary, indeed.

In the attic
Let's play Rapunzel. If you climb three stories up into the oldest turret in the Valley, inside the Rosson House-turned-museum, built in 1895, you'll find yourself in an attic.

"It was the tallest structure in Phoenix," says Rosson tour guide Beulah Matthews, "so you could see everybody's business and have something to talk about at tea."

Now in the attic, you'll find everybody's business from 1895, 1995, last Christmas and moments in between. There's a newfangled fake holiday tree and a vintage sled, constructed before the plastic age. They drag them out every year for the annual Rosson House Christmas fest, during which we pretend we live in the Victorian era and, apparently, in a place where there is actual snow for sledding.

Peeking out the turret's windows, hoping for a view into this business of being American, being Arizonan and wishing you were somewhere else, you can see bits of Camelback Mountain, with houses marching up the side, conquering the desert and the landscape that was there before.

In the distance, a row of imported and transplanted palm trees frames views of downtown Phoenix, AZ where eight cranes tangle with buildings old and new and always getting taller.

Outside, on the turret's ledge, a green-eyed pigeon rests on a nest wedged in where it's not supposed to be, where the gable meets the pigeon spikes, two eggs tucked beneath her. Home, it seems, looks just the way we want it to.
Jaimee Rose, The Arizona Republic Jan. 12, 2008, jaimee.rose@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8923.

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