Today's New York Times Home & Garden section stirs the pre-Labor Day doldrums with a lively piece on nudist-friendly/clothing-optional accommodations available on vacation site CouchSurfing. Among those interviewed are Yves Bornival, who hosts travelers in his Vancouver home ("nearly all of his guests, nudist or not, had taken off their clothes soon after arriving at his apartment"), Darius Zubrickas, a San Francisco interior designer who's found that his houseguests prefer to strip down in public, and Robert Redmond, an NYC retiree who usually wears nothing except a Swiss Army watch and Tevas. Redmond has hosted numerous travelers in his Upper West Side apartment and has:
"[provided] travelers with temporary havens from the tyranny of fabric and public nudity laws. More important, perhaps, from the hosts’ viewpoint, they are taking the intimacy of couch surfing to an extreme, bringing the unguarded ethos of the nudist camp into their homes." One of Redmond's 20-something visitors says he's all the better after his experience with this breed of artful couch surfing. “Before they met him, my friends were like, ‘You’re living with a nudist?’ But now they’re like, ‘You have the coolest roommate!’ They all want to come back and hang out with him.” One thing's for sure: if that topless woman sells her home in Georgia, she'll have a friendly, familiar place to crash in the big city.
Photo by Damon Winter/NYT
· You're Not a Stranger When You Leave [NYT]
· CouchSurfing [official site]
· Topless Woman Adds Certain Something to Listing Photo [Curbed National]
· Woman Creates Entire Art Project Out of the Art of Couch Surfing [Curbed National]
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