Minimalist Decorating

Somewhere in the books, journals, boxes and drawers of things-to-read, there is an article about a decorator whose London home was awe-inspiring in its simplicity and beauty. His entry stairs glowed with light and stairs: no pictures, no stair carpeting. Stairs. His dining room was a table and bench. No pictures on the walls, flowers on the hearth or table runner down the center board. His kitchen countertops were themselves: countertops, and when his wife prepared ten pounds of leeks for a dinner party, she had all the counter space in the kitchen to engage the leeks (since there were no flour or sugar jars, no toaster, no coffee maker or bean grinder staking territories). It was a lovely house. It was a peaceful house, easy to dust and very tidy since there was nothing to put away.

All of it was away: in drawers and closets. The decorator’s children were tidy with their toys. The decorator’s wife kept her cosmetics behind cabinet doors. Was it difficult to live in such peace and spareness, one of the magazine article writers asked. “We have a house in the country,” she answered, “where I decorate with cabbage rose prints and lots of swags and ruffles. This is a nice change, and so is that.” Very diplomatic. Instead of moving through the cycle of finding and bringing home, decorating with, and then shoving into a closet in order to reach a modicum of space, one decamps from the city to the country to enjoy the volte face of décor.

Not having the luxury of two houses, we need to decide how spare or how decorated our rooms are to be. Pictures or bare walls? Upholstered furniture with pillows or teak stools? Rugs and carpets? Bibelots - from the pot scouring mesh to the piece of colored glass on our counters? Family heirlooms on the table or put away in the drawers?

The furniture stores’ pseudo room arrangements now feature plastic glasses of plastic orange juice, a cereal bowl half-filled with plastic bran flakes never dissolving in their plastic milk. There’s a mixed drink on the sofa pull-out, and a bowl of fruit on the coffee table. Why? So we the browsers more clearly understand how the furniture would welcome us home. What is home? A place to share our food and our warmth, a place to learn, an operating room for leeks? Home is what each of us searches for: along with peace, and mother and love, it’s a word with strong connotations. Once we arrive, as we build it, what does our home say about us?

“You have an obsession with order and schedule,” someone comments, looking at the clocks in my home. True, though each of them registers a different time. “You like books,” says another visitor, stating the obvious. Books, clocks, places to read, colored glass. Dogs. Cats and children. Finds from our adventures. Photographs and pictures. Memories. Friendships. Leeks jostle the coffee maker and the breadboard where I am slicing homemade honey wheat bread. The dining room table bears school texts, a collection of pens, a jar of colored marbles. It may be cluttered, but it’s home. For some, the spare look works. We do not believe in minimalist decorating.