|
Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2010 18:40:56 GMT
Shutters have much more cultural significance than a lot of people realize. In Europe, there is a vast divide between northern Europe and Mediterranean Europe. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are shutterless people, and many of them have open disdain for shutters. “We have nothing to hide,” they say. “We don’t need shutters.” Indeed, when I go to certain northern countries, I am astounded at the totally open view of so many living quarters. One thing about it is great – housecleaning, at least for the people who live at ground level, is outstanding. I don’t think I have ever seen an exposed interior that was not impeccable, and it makes me SO happy that I live on the 3rd floor, since I never close my shutters. But being a “Mediterranean” person by extension, as are all French people, I know that the shutters are not there to hide anything (heh heh). They are there for thermal reasons – to keep the living quarters warmer or cooler. In these days of double glazed windows, they are not as important as they used to be for keeping us warmer, but they are still essential in hot places for keeping the sun out when the windows are open. So when I was in Avignon recently, I looked at a lot of shutters, since opening them and closing them is a ritual in the south during the hot months. (At the home of my grandparents in the northeast, it was a ritual as well – but shutters were opened to try to recuperate a bit of the solar heat, and closed a lot of the time in the winter to keep the cold at bay.) In Avignon, I saw that there was a large variety of shutters, with all sorts of slats or no slats at all, in good repair or falling apart. I confess that I paid no attention at all to metallic shutters or rolling plastic shutters, so you will not see any in this report. It was hot in Avignon. It was damned hot – usually about 35° C. Nobody in their right mind would want full sunlight beating down on their apartment. But in the morning or when the street was shady, sometimes the shutters would be open. But most of the time, in the relentless summer sun, shutters remain closed all day. I would love to see some of the interiors. I know that a lot of it is decrepit, but I always try to imagine “nice decrepit” like in Italian movies, where it doesn’t matter if the paint is peeling and the oilcloth on the kitchen table is 30 years old. Behind the shutters are a lot old people reading the newspaper with a glass of water and mint syrup, yes the old men smoking a Gauloise in the shadows. Perhaps there are young couples making sweaty love as they listen to the delivery trucks in the street and calculate how many minutes they have left. Children are impatient to be taken out to the park and hate the fact that it is forbidden to open the shutters. Cats doze on the dining room table, appreciating the combination of warmth and shade. Old ladies are already peeling the vegetables for lunch. In a few minutes, they will go down to the market to give extremely detailed instructions about the cut of meat or the fish that they need. I just love the life behind the shutters that I will never see
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2010 19:01:23 GMT
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jul 28, 2010 19:08:00 GMT
This is so nice to look at! Hope that doesn't sound too trite, but it's a gray, dank day here, and I'm soaking up the sun reflected on those many warm shades of yellow walls.
Lovely pictures, Kerouac, with the great homely touches you caught in so many of them.
One thing I noticed with delight was the greater range of colors those devil-may-care shutter owners used. In some of the other threads about different parts of France, I'd gotten the impression that towns each had one color for doors and shutters, and one color only.
|
|
|
Post by lola on Aug 26, 2010 0:59:16 GMT
This is great, K, photos and word pictures both. I love the mellow honey colored stone, too. You can feel the heat radiating from it.
In practical terms, the louvered kind are good for air flow, but take a lot of upkeep to scrape and paint.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Aug 27, 2010 16:21:21 GMT
You forgot another reason for shutters, at least as explained by some of my neighbours. The shutters prevent the sun from fading the furniture and carpets. Actually, I don't like closing shutters either, but in the summer when it's really hot and sunny, I close the shutters and window to keep the heat out. But only on the sunny side of the house. About colours, I have noticed over the past years that people around here are getting a bit more adventurous about using different colours. When we came here, everyone's shutters were brown/wood colour, dark green or white. The ones on our house were dark brown. I stripped them and painted them lapis lazuli blue. Now, when I walk around the neighbourhood, I see blue, light green, although often people still stay traditional. Another thing in France, is that there are rules about subdivisions.Around Toulouse, for example, which is called "la ville rose", new houses have to be stuccoed within a range of pinkish colours. Only older houses, like ours, can be painted whatever colour we want. And there are some villages, like Fontaine Daniel near Mayenne, where everybody has to have a similar-looking house.
|
|
|
Post by lola on Aug 27, 2010 18:06:49 GMT
I like that they care about aesthetics.
|
|
|
Post by cigalechanta on Aug 28, 2010 0:14:21 GMT
So true, K. I stayed over two weeks, traveling alone but stayed in Villeneurve-Lez-Avignon, walking across the bridge into Avignon or taking the bus after dark. I snapped many photos of shutters back in that yar but had no PC. I spent the last night in Avignon so I could be the station where the TGV was back in that time(I don't drive)
|
|
|
Post by gabriele on May 17, 2014 23:46:50 GMT
It's been 37 c here in Los Angeles and I do remember the great benefits of shutters that I enjoyed when staying in the south of France. I was there a couple of times in late fall/winter and they were a real benefit then too. Of course in the Pyrenees area, the shutters were solid, not louvered but I too remember the pleasure of being able to open them to let some sunlight in. I rented a gite once that was stone with 45 cm thick walls and since it was old, the shutters were heavy iron, but in addition to keeping out the heat of the day, they were also thick enough so there was no heat transfer through them. A house in Mirepoix that was the first place I stayed in France (and stayed several times after, including the last visit) had had wood shutters and they hadn't seemed well-maintained. In reading a blog from a local source (in French) she (La Dormeuse Blog) had photos of various houses along the canal that circles the town and I was both pleased (for the house) and not to see the shutters and door were either replaced or well-prepared and painted. The 'not' was because the owners are/were? Canadians and the husband was getting up in years and I don't know if the wife would have continued to come to France without him. But when one follows the life of a small town through blogs, online newspapers and city websites, there are always comings and goings... About the lack of shutters in northern Europe (parts)....there was a series of detective fiction about a Dutch detective van de Valk (Nicholas Freeling) and I remember one story where he visited a very isolated area in the Netherlands and as he walked around noted the lack of shutters and how one could observe the inhabitants everyday lives...which he doubted was how they really lived their lives.. My friend who lived in Amsterdam at the time agreed when I mentioned the story...said the lack of privacy in ground level dwellings bothered him no end...that he was both drawn to look and repelled by the idea of seeing someone else's private life--especially if it were boring and full of typical practival Dutch things...
and K, your curiosity about what's behind the shutters...I feel something similar but in a different way...I love to look at online ads for houses for sale...the older the better. And in renting gites, my rule of thumb was 'the older the better'...the oldest was the house in Mirepoix, built partially with stones from the old city wall, originally a business downstairs (so small!) and living quarters (2 rooms) upstairs (but most of the houses along the canal were like that..). That place was at least 300+ years...the house (with the iron shutters) was 150+....the old stone basin (1x2 m) for laundry was still there, along with nearby well (covered over). The original kitchen was somewhat detached from the house proper (safety, no doubt) and still had an immense grilleade (is that the correct term for the barbecue?) Sometimes I would find out some of the history of the original owners of the houses...and if really fortunate, the stories and old photos would have been passed along to the new owners... When I rented a cottage in Paris in Montmartre, the dwellings that were on the open square (a small one, and not really square) had been nun's dwellings...but the week I stayed there my dreams were all about events during WWII....people hiding, planning an escape, like that sometime I might do some research to see if there's anything about that specific area...I was there Christmas to just after New Years and it rained off and on...my friend couldn't join me which was fine, I was able to explore Paris in a somewhat surrealistic fog of the dreams, feeling invisible (neither a local nor a tourist) and never seeing any of the neighbors (apartment houses/flats surrounded the smaller dwellings). And I had no interest in knowing anything about them... When you explore the 'unimproved' areas of Paris do you ever get lost in time, however briefly?
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 18, 2014 15:15:33 GMT
What a fabulous report K2!! First off, I love shutters and your accompanying narrative describes just the right mood that comes to my mind as well.
Shutters play a prominent role here in New Orleans as you can well imagine. Not just to block the sun, although I do see some homes utilizing them in this fashion, but more importantly to protect during tropical storms and hurricanes. Most of them are made of cypress, and, the old ones are quite valuable. I once busted someone trying to steal my neighbor's shutters that had been taken down temporarily while her house was being painted. The guy brazenly, in broad daylight entered her yard and started to carry off a pair when I saw him and questioned him as to who he was and what was he doing. He dropped the shutters and ran. (Sorry for the ramble good people...)
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 18, 2014 18:43:51 GMT
Thanks. It's always better late than never when a thread is finally rediscovered. Some of them -- like this one -- never go out of date.
|
|
|
Post by htmb on Jul 15, 2014 10:22:12 GMT
As the thunder storm continues to rage outside my windows I'm wishing shutters were a tradition in North Central Florida!
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Jul 15, 2014 15:13:15 GMT
I see that this thread also touched on the strange LACK of shutters or curtains in Amsterdam (and probably, in other Dutch cities). For one thing, it is a way of enforcing tidy housekeeping. You can really see into ground floor or entresol flats, which embarrassed me if there were humans present (often one would simply see cats and dogs sunning themselves).
Where I stay now when there is in a far more immigrant, multicultural neighbourhood, around Dappermarkt and Javastraat in Eastern Amsterdam. People from other cultures refuse to obey the Dutch tradition, and there are far more curtains and blinds drawn.
Of course, the big windows were a means of GETTING light from the stingy Northern sun, and the frequent clouds and rain. Unlike Avignon, or the places where I lived in Italy.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Jul 20, 2017 4:12:18 GMT
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Jul 20, 2017 6:45:18 GMT
Is it an impression or are people beginning to paint their shutters in Avignon?
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Jul 20, 2017 9:53:27 GMT
I am of the impression that shutters are always painted - or at least 'lasuré' which taints them for weather protection. I'll try to post a pic of my shutters. My in law made them and they survived 2 break-ins attempts.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Jul 20, 2017 9:57:42 GMT
Whatagain, I mean using colour rather than just wood/lasure.
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Jul 23, 2017 10:25:41 GMT
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Jul 23, 2017 10:26:04 GMT
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Jul 23, 2017 10:27:21 GMT
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Jul 23, 2017 13:22:51 GMT
There was a bit of lavender in the Vaucluse report last year.
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Jul 24, 2017 15:28:49 GMT
|
|