Here's one of those quirky...

...pieces in the Times that I love so much. It's about people who live without indoor heat. Yes, you read that correctly.

SERIOUS cold, Justen Ladda said, is when the sponge in the kitchen sink feels like wood or the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator turns itself off, as it did one particularly frigid day last winter. Not that Mr. Ladda, a 56-year-old sculptor who has lived heat-free in his Lower East Side loft for three decades, is bothered by such extremes. “Winter comes and goes,” he’ll tell you blithely, adjusting his black wool scarf and watch cap. (Along with fingerless gloves, long underwear and felt slippers, they are part of Mr. Ladda’s at-home uniform when the mercury dips.)

Mr. Ladda, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, decided long ago to live without central heating.

What?

Indeed, 55 degrees would qualify as sauna conditions for Mr. Ladda and others whose interiors hover around the 30- or 40-degree mark in deep winter.

As Jon Stewart would say, go onnn...

Mr. Ladda on the Lower East Side doesn’t entertain, either, but he occasionally has overnight guests.

“I had Japanese friends here once,” he said. “And when they left, they bowed and said solemnly, ‘We are very sorry you have to live this way.’ ”
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Then there are those who seek out the cold for its clarifying effects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science writer who lives in a warm town house on the Upper West Side, makes monthly winter pilgrimages to a century-old, “very primitive” former one-room schoolhouse in Long Eddy, N.Y. There is no water when the temperature is below freezing (she hauls it from a stream), but there is a wood-burning stove.

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

And anyway, she pointed out, “we didn’t evolve to sit on a chair in a temperature-controlled environment staring at a screen all day.”

Like, me?

“The best thing about living in a non-isothermal house” — isothermal means “constant in temperature” — “is that you’re able to walk from indoors to out of doors all the time,” she said.

Right. Can't do that in my eccentric isothermal house. Where do they find these people?