Slow Homes
Or, How to Approach Your Space Like a Storyteller
A design trend I find puzzling is the one where everything looks like it was purchased on the same day, at the same time, in the same place. Many home make-over shows (which I adore nonetheless) achieve this look in the end, no matter how much the designers have tried to “get to know” the home-dwellers, and add “personal touches,” the results feel generic. Brand New is great for order and tidiness, but not for soul and storytelling. As an aesthetic, Brand New feels corporate, and has capitalism’s hallmark whiff of frantic false urgency and impatience (You need this new thing right now! Everyone else is doing it! It might sell out and you’ll miss it!). Personal touches are not the same as personal touch. You can’t buy patina (I mean you can—if you have the budget to shop here, or here, but you know what I mean). You need patience, and the passage of time (a phrase I love—time as a passage, so many good implicit metaphors!). Layers too—they need to accrue gradually, organically.
I love a specific home. A personal home. A Slow Home. A home that exudes the dwellers wonderfully specific them-ness. The weird thoughtful choices. A home full of treasured objects gathered over a lifetime. Homes where the objects don’t seem to have originated from any given store so much as been birthed in situ, a gorgeous physical manifestation of the homemakers themselves. Vanessa Bell’s Charleston in Sussex. Georgia O’Keefe’s home in Abiquiu. The home Julie O’Rourke and Anthony Esteves are building together in Maine. Notably, all these homes are the homes of artists, with not only the well-trained eye to create such original beauty, but also the time to devote to such creation, and perhaps most critically, the abiding belief that such pursuits are worthy of the time.
Just as there is a slow food movement, let’s nurture a Slow Homes movement. This may appeal to me now more than ever as I am still on my Spending Freeze. Even if I wanted Brand New, I can’t afford it. So be it. I’m leaning into Rituals and Rearrangements. To heirlooms and hand-me-downs. And along the way, I am guided in my home-making (can we reclaim this derogatory moniker, home-maker, from dated Mommy Wars? We all must make homes for ourselves, no?) by applying principles of storytelling I learned in college and grad school studying creative writing to designing a space.
We’ve all heard writing is re-writing. But too often in school opportunities to revise are an invitation to more closely adhere to what your teacher believes your writing ought to do. Ugh! No wonder AI is proliferating. What could be more tedious? Let’s reclaim revising as bringing a piece of work (be it an essay or a house) into a more full and clear expression of what you, the creator, most hoped to express. Let’s examine a handful of literary lessons to see how they apply, and in so doing revise our homes that they may sing our song, tell our story, and make us feel our fullest versions of self.
