I just spent a weekend cruising design blogs and staggered off to bed on Sunday night satiated with Cute, Adorable and Fabulous. Is this what my life has come to, I wondered, as I fell asleep with visions of dreamy paint colors, amazing headboards and stenciled wallpaper swirling through my brain? I used to get in dramatic arguments with lovers outside Irish bars that involved smashing Irish Coffee cups and then falling into each other’s arms under noirish street lights. I stayed up late talking about T.S. Eliot and masturbation. I have been known to jump in fountains! But now I can be found lurking around sites that feature other people’s tragically hip lofts in Brooklyn and stuffed objects and artwork that feature hybrid creatures that are a cross between humans and bunnies. Yes, I would love for my house to be a work of art like the one created by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, but I also want it to be organic, an outgrowth of my own personality, not something I have to study or emulate or copy from tearsheets. My iconic house memory is of my grandmother’s house in rural Kentucky. It was filled with inherited objects–silver, quilts sewed by long-dead aunts, furniture that had the patina of decades of use by ordinary families. It never changed over the years except for occasionally repainting or cleaning the wallpaper. It was timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned. Several generations had passed through it, sat in the chairs, leaned their elbows on the enameled kitchen table. Their spirits lingered. I want to live in that kind of house, not an Ikea idea or an easy-to-assemble resemblance. After my weekend of design dessert, I want a timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned supper of a life.
