Thinking About Grottos!!
I experienced a fright on Monday night around midnight mid-Kissing Jessica Stein viewing. Someone had posted a photo taken at New Jersey’s preeminent fantasy themed motel Feather Nest Inn, but when I went to browse the rooms for late-night comfort, I saw this: “Someone suggested this status Permanently Closed.” Pretending to need a room for this Friday, I gave the Feather Nest front desk a ring to be sure they were still open, and they are! This anticlimactic but reassuring anecdote is not only to let you know that they’re open, but it’s a lead-in to the grotto rabbit hole I fell into after.
Most rooms at the Feather Nest look like they are grottos, but the two official cave-related rooms are the Natural Cave and the Ice Cave. Both have walls sculpted and painted to resemble caves, and the Ice Cave room is particularly enchanting with mirrors and fake rocks to disorient you just as much as you should be in a room like this.
Searching “what is a grotto” brought up these two definitions: “a small picturesque cave, especially an artificial one in a park or garden” and “an indoor structure resembling a cave.” Like most things, the story of grottos involve God, sex and nature. Irish reverend G. (George) Gregory wrote about grottos in his 1816 gardening dictionary New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Grottos, as defined by Reverend and gardening fan Gregory, were “adorned with rustic architecture, and their inside with shell-work, fossils, etc.” An exact recipe was also included for mixing the cement for your artificial grotto.
The sound and dampness of water was noted as crucial. “A fountain or gushing stream is a very appropriate ornament to a grotto; though, where practicable, it is better in an adjoining cave, when a person sitting in the grotto can hear the murmur of the water, and see the light reflected on it at a distance, than in the grotto itself,” wrote Jane Loudon in 1845’s Gardening for Ladies.
In this history lesson that I HOPE is keeping your attention, I learned that the word “grotesque” came from the word “grotto” when Roman emperor Nero’s 16th-century ruins were discovered. His unfinished, wildly extravagant Domus Aurea was a sort of Roman Playboy Mansion. The discovered ruins were called grotte, Italian for cave, and the word “grotesque” came to describe the bizarre frescos inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses found in the cave-like rooms. Women transforming into columns, freaky masks, half-human and half-animal creatures, things like that. Very grotto!
What I did not know was that “grotto” also refers to Catholic shrines built in a rock formation. (I thought they were just called shrines!) “Awesome Grotto Build For Another Local Church” reads the YouTube title for a video by Florida landscaping firm Earth Works Jax. In this video, our host Sean stands in front of an old, white Catholic church, Spanish moss draped over low trees, about an hour from the coast. Sean explains that he put three lights inside the grotto, placing two lights on the front of Mary “kind of lighting her up.” With the waterfall, he continues, the church “didn’t want anything crazy” so instead of a “massive flow,” he opted for a “2,000-4,000 [gallon] aqua surge.”
“Imagine this being in your backyard,” Sean tempts us. “And you wanted it a little bit quieter. If it was too loud and you wanted to have a little bit of intimate time with your wife or your husband, you actually can hear each other.” Grottos are intimate spiritually, personally and sexually.
They are sort of escapist portals, which were especially du jour in the 70s and 80s. A 2015 article by drydockshop (they were a great Tumblr, not sure where they went!) wrote about portals in that era as “very relevant and very literal” design touches that “transform space, add excitement, and transport the occupant into another state of mind.”
So many nostalgic decor resurgences are about stepping into a new dimension inside the place where you live. Grottos are the ultimate in escapist sensibilities! They are most commonly added to pools, an escape in your own backyard. The most famous pool grotto is, of course, at the Playboy Mansion. This also connects to what most of us associate with grottos: filthy times.
The Playboy Mansion grotto was, as Vogue describes, “the site of many spontaneous tête-a-têtes” aka threesomes but just like group sex does not come without its UTIs, a grotto tête-a-tête does not come without its Legionnaires’ disease (and UTIs!). Over 100 party-goers reportedly contracted the illness from the bunny pool after a 2011 party. Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Isabella St. James, who dated Hugh from 2002 to 2004, curbed the grotto’s mystique.
“No one was having fun in the grotto when I was there,” she said in an interview with People. “We sometimes enjoyed the jets as a therapeutic massage! I think the most fun was by people at parties who would jump in so they could say that they did. There is an aura about it. But that was always entertaining to us, because they were having more fun than we did! Nothing freaky or exciting was happening in the grotto for us.”
Tight, dark spaces began to lose interest to us, societally speaking, somewhere around the 90s. They began to connote sleaze, sex, germs. Here at Very Famous’ Indoor Pool Trend Forecasting Agency, we’re not sure we see grottos coming back, per se, though we would…love that. They are primarily wet and damp and dark. This does not bode well with our moral times and consuming desire for wellness!
But light is something I think about a lot. It’s, of course, relative to the eyes and experience of each person, but I feel like our eyes may see too much light. We’re staring at screens that have the brightness automatically turned up, our windows let more light in, our spaces are airier. This has often been a good thing, but it’s missing the counterbalance of dark spaces that allow us to escape, to rest our eyes, to feel like we’re in a new world where we can’t sense the perimeters of a room.
Last year, I spent my share of time going to New Age-esque sites with earth tones and big fonts. On one of these sites (innerworldtherapy.com) there was a reflection on embracing darkness in autumn and winter.
As autumn deepens we are quested with a journey into our own underworld. And while the nights grow longer many of us can expect to feel sad, alone, or withdrawn, just as Persephone did upon her initial arrival in the underworld. However these, and other unpleasant feelings that we confront, can act as a catalyst for deeper engagement with our inner Self.
Spending time in dark places can be a way to engage deeper and darker with the inner Self. They make you talk easier, look softer and longer. The flip side — or at least another side — of those ruminations is extreme indulgence.
In a 2015 Gizmodo article, writer Alissa Walker examined the allure of grottos after Drake had bought the YOLO estate with a grotto that Rolling Stone described as “tricked out with a wet bar, illuminated wading pools, flat-screen TVs, and a dozen other details that take time to fully register.” Walker refers to grottos as the “wet dreams of the nouveau riche,” a moisture and sex-infused dank place with its modern popularity tracing back to the Playboy Mansion grotto. The Playboy grotto was designed and built by a Chicago design team and couple Suzanne and Ron Dirsmith in 121 days. “Upon entering the Grotto, visitors tend to be surprised by the variety of the sources of pleasure they encounter,” the Dirsmiths wrote in WaterShapes magazine. The three obscured entrances of the “play space” worked together to “lend an air of mystery to the space while giving it an otherworldly glow.”
Poolonomics.com quotes a “basic, 2-person” grotto as running between $5,000 and $10,000 with more ornate features such as stairs and a slide upping the range to $15,000 to $50,000. For grotto architects Aquatic Artists based somewhere in the tristate area, you can browse their portfolio of three options: classic, deluxe and ultimate grottos.
Until my chance to build a YOLO grotto arrives on horseback, I will aim to bring in the grotto lifestyle as much as I can with plush decorative pillows, room dividers, dim lighting, faux boulders kept au naturel or painted light lavender, bowls of water, light-up fountains, possibly an inflatable pool indoors. More escape, more surprise, murky little rooms. Or you can just go to the Feather Nest Inn in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
April 10, 2020
In "Features"