Staging the Next Stage
We are blessed with several friends who seem to enjoy being of service to Kim, and by extension, to me. They like helping her pack, unpack, organize stuff, sort out her clothes and other stuff. For two weeks we had Oswaldo here and that was a pleasure. Every time I turned around he would be doing this or that quite tirelessly and with no complaints. I actually think he likes staying busy and being helpful without strong opinion. And he is that and more.
This week, now that we are cutting through the 350 boxes that we managed to fill from our little NYC apartment, we are trying to absorb all that stuff into our new home without making the place look like an over-crowded curio shop. In the last twenty-five years, I’ve gotten very good at going online and between art.com and several standard home furnishing sites (Wayfair, Frontgate, West Elm, etc.) and furnishing a vacation house down to the spoons, as they say. Buying vacation homes on a turnkey basis has become quite popular, and I’ve done that a few times, but more often than not, I’m working with a blank canvas and using my “chainsaw interior design” skills to set up the house. That’s what happened with this house eight years ago. And as of this week we still have lots of artwork and other stuff that we don’t have any particular history with beyond that we’ve gotten used to it over the last eight years. That all means we start from a place of being prepared to shed items that have acted as placeholders for us. Sounds easy, plays hard.
What Kim has also done this week is to invite her old Showboat National Road Tour companion, Kristoffer to come and help her for a week. Back in 1999 Kristoffer played the Sheriff, while Kim played Parthy, the matriarch in Showboat. . Eight times a week for three months, Kim had to faint on top of Kristoffer (she did it for a year, but Kristoffer only lasted for three months before giving up on long bus rides, cheesy hotels and the thud of a prat fall by a big blonde). But that was enough for Kim and Kristoffer to become fast friends even though, as a gay man, Kristoffer didn’t get any tickle from the physical female contact.. I guess if someone catches you in a swoon eight hundred times, it builds a rapport of sorts nonetheless.
Kristoffer is not exactly like Oswaldo. Where Oswaldo is like the old western song where never is heard a discouraging word, Kristoffer is a bit more critical and he is one of the world-class discouragers in the Continental United States. To a certain extent that’s probably a good thing since it takes a tough taskmaster to triage 30-40 years worth of junk. What Kristoffer does so well is stylize. He specializes in staging and could make a living doing it with great precision. When I hang a picture I take a nail, I eyeball the wall and surrounding objects, and then I apply hammer to nail and voila, the picture is hung. Kristoffer, on the other hand, does a lot of measuring. He measures in every direction and uses a picture hanging tool to precisely figure out where the nail should go. The damn thing even has a bubble level to insure that nothing causes you to tilt your head even a little. There is masking tape involved as well, but I haven’t figured out yet what that does for the process.
What we do is unpack all these boxes (we have about 60 to go now) and put anything that qualifies as an interesting object in the living room. Kristoffer then stands back with hand on hip, opines about what should go where. Groupings are very big with Kristoffer and he has never met an odd number of items that he doesn’t like. He has categorized our objects into two interesting categories; tribal and sophisticated. Having lived and traveled extensively throughout the developing world (a.k.a. The Emerging Markets) and having a number of artistic friends, we have accumulated a lot of interesting items from the strange and distant parts of the world. Some of them are genuine antiquities that I have literally unearthed. I was a junior archeologist in my youth. When you are five years old and stuck in a small topical valley in Costa Rica, archeology seems pretty darn interesting. I went with a friend of my mother’s to a place with lots of burial mounds back in the days before historical preservation was a thing. We dug up lots of interesting relics in pumice (there are two big volcanos in Costa Rica) and tons of pre-Columbian pottery. Between that and the stuff sold to us by itinerant diggers, we gathered a tidy collection, which I now possess. I even added to it during my Roman holiday when I dug up a bunch of amphorae shards. Bottom line, all very indigenous and some might say tribal stuff.
Some of the miscellaneous objects are just odd things we’ve come across in our far-flung travels or that people with a similar eye for the indigenous might give to us. But apparently it’s all tribal to Kristoffer. I suspect he hears beating drums when he comes into our home. Nevertheless, while I suspect he would have none of it in his home, he does do a good job of arranging it on the various shelves and walls of our living room.
Kristoffer and I don’t have much to disagree about on the tribal miscellany, but when we shift gears into the sophisticated, it becomes a bit more challenging. To my eye, Kristoffer’s sophisticated look feels a lot like a New Orlean’s House of the Rising Sun. Granted he is working with what we have given to him, so maybe its us that has whorehouse modern tastes. As it turns out, we have about 40% of our decorative stuff in this sophisticated genre. The living room is decidedly tribal with a touch of American Navajo/Anasazi from our southwestern motorcycle travels to Canyon de Chelly and Four Corners. The Master Bedroom is very sophisticated European, mostly ancient Roman and Grecian, with a hint of traditional Japanese culture from our travels to Kyoto and Kim’s parents’ stint in post-war Japan. The guest rooms are more modern eclectic with reminiscences of New York City. The dining room is France with emphasis on Bayeux and Paris. The kitchen is all American southwest with mosaic tile roadrunner and cactus accents (compliments of my nephew, Jason). The study is memorabilia lane. And the hallways are transitional spots for miscellaneous stuff that fits the spaces on the wall.
This staging process has not just involved artwork and objects, but has also involved moving non-central furniture (tables, chairs and bookcases) here and there to better suit the new staged tone and color scheme. It all looks great, which is what we care about mostly. Kristoffer has an entire narrative about the flow of colors and shapes as one walks from one area of the house to another. I must admit to sort of understanding it all, but also that its not the way I necessarily notice things as I walk through the house.
One’s surroundings are important. They set a mental tone for us. They remind us of what’s important. Indeed, this is proving to be a staging of the next stage of our lives. We are glad to have Kristoffer’s help with all of this. I just hope I don’t wake up one morning and start thinking about my harsh country upbringing in Deep South Alabama, since that is Kristoffer’s reality and not mine.