"Living the dream

Yes, this one is egregious enough -- an op ed a front page news story about the sorry fate of our country's wealthiest executives and the extraordinary pressures they face.

But it's this one that really got me sputtering this morning.

Still, for Ms. Bigbie, an interior designer and aesthetic omnivore, and her boyfriend, Jay Shapiro, 33, a skateboarder who is the bass player for Space Vacation, a heavy metal band in San Francisco, skateboarding — its renegade, Zen essence — is a way of life. And pool skating is the apogee.

This is how the empty pool as metaphor and touchstone became a focal point for the tiny Victorian house Ms. Bigbie and Mr. Shapiro bought in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco four years ago. In the backyard, they planned to sink a swimming pool, and never fill it. As a placeholder, they erected a skate ramp that had belonged to a friend and was made, in part, from reclaimed barn siding.

“It was beautiful,” Ms. Bigbie said mistily. “We called it ‘Living the Dream.’ ”

[...]

Ms. Bigbie and Mr. Shapiro met 10 years ago at Skater Island, a now-defunct skate park in Middletown, R.I. She was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and living in Providence; he was doing construction in Newport, where he lived. Ms. Bigbie would drive down on Friday nights to hang out at the park, and she noted Mr. Shapiro’s fine skating moves and, she said, “I just thought he was really cute.”

For his part, Mr. Shapiro was happy to meet a female skateboarder “who wasn’t a weirdo,” as he put it. “Claire was really cool. We would skateboard together, have a few beers. After that we were attached at the hip.”

After Ms. Bigbie graduated in 2001, the couple lived in London for a year. Ms. Bigbie — who had been collecting furniture since she was 14 (about the same time she started skating) and had designed a skateboard clothing line by 16 and graphics for the indie record company Tooth + Nail by 18 — worked at the British furniture design company Precious McBane. Mr. Shapiro became an assistant to Richie Hopson, a British photographer.

When he was offered a job as a team manager for Think Skateboards in San Francisco, they returned, and Ms. Bigbie became a stylist for the do-it-yourself magazine Ready Made. They moved into a rental cottage in the Mission along with two dogs (Sen-C, a mutt, and Rollie, a black Labrador), his musical instruments and her furniture.

“I had an apartment’s worth of furniture by the time I left home for college,” Ms. Bigbie said. “The cottage was way too small.”

The real estate market was heating up, and they lost out on a few places before buying this one (2,000 square feet including an in-law apartment) for $1 million in 2005. At first, they thought they could renovate it themselves. But as Mr. Shapiro and his friends began scooping out its innards — the house had been divided into two apartments with tiny, dark rooms — it became clear an architect was needed, if only to obtain building permits.

Ya know, it would be none of my business normally, but since the pair are featured prominently in the New York Times Home section and are portrayed as such counter-cultural hipsters, it would be nice to know how a 30 year old designer and her 33 bassist-sometime construction worker-boyfriend could "live in London for a year," then plop down a cool million for a Victorian in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

One assumes there are some wealthy parents/benefactors out there, but I guess in the elite world of New York Times reporters and editors, it is simply not unusual for young skateboarders to have this kind of money, so there's no need to mention how they acquired such wealth.

And to ignore the fact that they spent that million at the very peak of the housing bubble only makes it worse.