The house as a (Rube Goldbergian) machine for living
A few months ago, I read Deborah Needleman's The Perfectly Imperfect Home. One passage clanged around my brain, echoing at odd hours:
When I visit a beautifully run home (usually belonging to a fancy decorator or rich person), I am as fascinated by what's hidden away as by what's on display. A little snooping almost always reveals an orderly pantry with entertaining supplies lined up like patient soldiers waiting to serve. It's not just the sheer volume of linens and vases and platters and the ready supplies of candles, tea lights and votives that impress. Although they do. It's how beautifully they're organized. Here are a couple of secrets I've stolen: use a label maker to ID the front of each shelf with what goes where. (This is to keep the staff from mixing things up, but it works equally well when you are your staff.) And toss the broken, ripped, stained, and chipped, plus those things you never use and think you will someday. They are making it hard to find what you need, and therefore planning is that much more difficult.
If you take time to arrange items neatly, press linens before you need them, and order supplies like candles in bulk, you will be rewarded with a wave of domestic satisfaction every time you see them.
Back when weekends were crammed with swim practices (for both child and mother), hikes in the east bay's abundant hills, volunteer commitments, get-togethers with friends, impulse lunches downtown after morning errands, the idea of carving out a few hours to organize our house's one closet seemed like wanton Type-A luxury. In this life, I had four hours on my hands last Sunday and a label maker locked and loaded with fresh tape. I now have a closet that truly does give me a frisson of satisfaction any time I open it.
I can't lay my hands directly on the source material, but back in 2009, I was reading a little booklet I picked up at the Tower of London, written by the late Terry Jones, and one of the things he wrote has stayed with me: back in Tudor times, the notion of being comfortable in one's residence (or as a guest) was not based on physical comfort, but rather emotional and psychological comfort. One could be freezing in a draughty dining room but feel warm inside because one was assured of one's place in the duke's esteem. I had grown up conceiving of home as the space on one side of an impregnable wall between one's public life and one's private life. That someone's private sense of comfort could be predicated on a web of public interactions was a wild idea for me -- the wall was more like a permeable membrane.
For some, one of the most challenging things about the past few weeks has been seeing how easily things pass between that membrane -- even when they don't want them to. More than one woman I know ( … but no men) has talked about how stressful it is to try and balance around-the-clock parenting with remote work. A lot of parents I know have talked about how they're trying to keep their homes secure, sanitary and sane for kids who desperately need some sense of safety right now. Some editor lost their mind and thought it was a good idea to greenlight a story where the writer chided people for not maintaining the illusion that they were good little corporate automatons with nothing in their lives but their jobs.
Everyone is grappling with the reality that their living quarters are now being expected to act as multiple, formerly discrete places -- fitness centers, schoolrooms, offices, retreats -- and often simultaneously. Ikea had predicted this sort of trend toward multifunctional rooms and furniture five years ago, but I don't think they saw it happening like this.
In Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life, he writes:
Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world—whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over—eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment—they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
And as of right now, being stuck in our homes is where history is beginning. We are all in the room where it happens.
FURTHER READING
"Home Alone: The Dark Heart of Shelter-Lit Addiction" (The Atlantic, March 2006 issue) -- "A lovely white iron bedstead: funky, fresh-looking, impeccable shabby chic. I wanted it immediately. But suddenly I found myself imagining all the people who had slept, and possibly died, in this particular bed over the past hundred years."
"Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell On Our Return to the Tackiest Era of All Time" (Interview, March 13, 2019) -- "Huge foyers, with huge chandeliers and huge staircases, giant emerald-like kitchens, like they’re on the cooking channel or whatever. You have these spaces for entertaining that just completely isolate different parts of the house from one another that are rarely used, statistically-speaking. It’s aspirational. It’s the dream house built for the parties that you’ll never have."
"Homes Actually Need to Be Practical Now" (The Atlantic, March 29, 2020) -- "When home is everything all at once, escape and confinement at the same time, its utility becomes more acute. And so do its shortcomings."
"New Paint" (Saturday Night Live, November 2, 2019) -- As someone who inhaled the New Yorker's "The Luxury Paint Company Creating a New Kind of Decorating Anxiety" (March 11, 2019) and fiercely covets several gallons of Hague Blue, I found this SNL sketch extremely on-point. It's appropriate for those of us staring at our walls and wondering if repainting the house is the next step after reorganizing the closet.
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).