By WILL NORTH

For The Beachcomber

“I can’t talk about it with dry eyes.”

Some years ago, I’d been interviewing Grant Hildebrand, emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Washington and a renowned expert on what creates pleasure in the built landscape around us.

We’d just discovered we were both in love with a very small town in England, called Burford.

It’s a nearly linear village of largely medieval limestone dwellings and shops running cheek-by-jowl down both sides of a steep street that ends at a one-lane, humpbacked stone bridge over the pretty little river Windrush.

I doubt anyone can stand at the top of that village, looking down this ancient street, and not be moved by its nearly heartbreaking charm, peace and comfort. You want to move in immediately.

I didn’t find Hildebrand’s emotional response the least bit theatrical because I have the very same reaction every time I visit Burford.

Why is that? Why do some places grab us by the throat, the way a good detective mystery does right from the first paragraph, so we can’t let go? What is it about them that makes us feel so comfortable?

This is the fourth in a series of columns I’m calling “The Anatomy of Home.” In earlier columns we’ve looked at Place, Shape and Beauty. Today we explore Comfort.

Most people will just shrug and say, “Home is where you feel comfortable.”

That’s never been good enough for me, and it wasn’t for Hildebrand or his colleague Jay Appleton, either. They wanted to know why. And they found out.

Let’s turn the question upside down: Have you ever been someplace you absolutely, positively knew — in your bone marrow, in your smallest cells — you didn’t belong? Of course you have, unless you’ve led a very sheltered life. Why was that? That’s right, because it made you feel uncomfortable. What makes some places comfortable and others decidedly not?

Several decades ago a team of thinkers led by Canadian architect Christopher Alexander decided to try to understand why, for example, charming European villages … well, charmed us.

The result was a thick, brilliant, though rather academic book called, “A Pattern Language.” Academic or not, it’s so important that it’s still in print.

I do immense injustice when I summarize it by saying the authors noted that places that feel comfortable and welcoming tend to be clustered around intimate public spaces and have buildings no more than four stories high.

They have traffic patterns that cause involvement rather than disengagement. They have “public living rooms”—sidewalk cafés, pubs, plazas for seeing and being seen. And much more. There is, in short, both order and complexity in such comfortable places — and all of it is built at a human scale.

Hildebrand and Appleton, though, said that wasn’t enough: “Alexander tells us what gives us comfort,” Hildebrand told me, “but not why.” Why, indeed?

Instead of answering directly, let me give an example. I live on a beach overlooking outer Quartermaster Harbor.

From the windows of my study I can see a great expanse of water stretching southward, embraced by two encompassing and protecting arms of land: the western shore of Maury Island and the eastern shore of southern Vashon. It is a splendid prospect.

And in just a few more weeks it is also likely to be a dramatic one, as the prevailing winters storms will scream right up from the south toward my windows. But I will not be uncomfortable about this.

Why? Because, first of all, I have prospect: I can see threats coming and prepare. Second, I have refuge: I have tight windows, strong walls, a gas range, a wood stove with plenty of stacked and split madrona and lots of candles. Prospect and refuge. They’re needs that go back to our caveman days, needs deeply encoded in the DNA of our species. They’re all about staying safe, and safety is perhaps the most primitive definition of comfort.

An island like Vashon sometimes seems a small and perilous thing, especially in winter. But with just a few adjustments and preparations, it can also be an Island of comfort — a place a part of and yet apart from the rest of the world, enfolding, encompassing, protected and protecting.

— Will North is the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, and is currently working on a novel set on Vashon.