“Lucky” is the word you apply to Michael Williams as he leads you up the long flight of stairs to his apartment above a Downtown Mall bank. After all, most people don’t get to sit in their living rooms, looking out over the city’s bustling heart, above the fray yet deliciously within reach. But Williams and his wife, Jill, aren’t just lucky. They’ve made the most of this unusual space; the apartment’s sheer size, its high ceilings and commanding views, are allowed to shine, only subtly accented with understated furnishings.
Case in point: the L-shaped couch Williams built about 15 years ago to anchor the living room. It’s got built-in bookshelves around the back—befitting a guy who used to own a bookstore—filled with part of the couple’s fiction collection, and is oversized enough to accommodate all three Williamses (Michael, Jill, and their 12-year-old daughter, Chan). Here, the story of the couch in Williams’ own words.
 |
“There had been a bench here. Jill and I decided to expand the couch. It’s basically two futon [mattresses]. It’s oak, unfinished. I wanted to have bookshelves around the outside and electricity in the corners so we could have reading lamps if we wanted. The books go from Anne Rice to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. It does include your Tolstoys, your Richard Russo, Sir Walter Scott. [The couch] is bolted into the floor pretty well. I like the stability of that, because you can’t move it. There are a lot of ropes involved, for tension. The mattresses slide in. [To build something like this] you need a lot of cotton batting and the will to finish.
“We tried to cover it ourselves which was an effort that involved many tears and false starts. We had a medium-sized dog and he destroyed the couch, as dogs do. We re-covered it after Henry left us. I finished up the outside edges and bought 27 yards of fabric at The Second Yard. I was pretty used to cutting wood, but where do you start with 27 yards of fabric? That’s a lot of stuff. If you screw up you have to go back for more. It all turned out perfectly because I’m very fearful about that stuff.
“My wife and daughter and I will all go to sleep in the couch. My wife [a teacher at Western Albemarle High School] is usually working like crazy until all hours. I tend to be reading. Chan does homework, or she has a workspace over there [in the corner, on the big rug]. When there are flare-ups at Rapture we can observe them and call 911. We can watch the TV from here; we have the fireplace. We can read, mostly.”
