The Eclectic Home
A few years ago we visited two homes on either coast of the country. One was the New York condominium apartment of a an old colleague and the other was a friend’s condo out here in the West. Both homes had something in common, they were as lovely and well-decorated as a model home on HGTV might be, but they both equally lacked any soul. They didn’t looked lived-in. Indeed, both were second homes for the owners, but both were used often enough so that the two couples involved spent half or more of their time there. Personalization was completely lacking in either apartment even though the beige and black decors were very soothing and pleasant.
I understand that too much quirky personalization to a home can make it less appealing for resale, but have we all come to the point where we own homes for their investment value and consider them merely way-stations for maintaining wealth? If that is so, I suggest we all go back to crossing days off the calendar as an approach to keeping track of time. I suppose it is possible that some people revel in the purity of clean lines and aesthetic simplicity, and I watch enough HGTV to understand that there are trendy staged looks for homes that make them more appealing to a broader marketplace, but I, for one, believe that a home is supposed to be, first and foremost, pleasing to its inhabitants. If you need to do some clean-line decorating, perhaps the guest rooms are the place to do that best. In theory, keeping the guest rooms generic may be a good idea and may even keep guests from getting to the unwelcome stage too soon by causing them to question or comment on your aesthetic choices for “their” space.
I am reminded of a visit we made to the woman who was our governess when we were children growing up in Venezuela. The woman’s name was Maria, but she was of Germanic descent. She was my version of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music except I don’t remember her being particularly musical and unlikely to fall in love and marry my father (or my mother for that matter). She took impeccable care of the three of us both in Caracas and then for a year in Santa Monica. I remember two lessons in particular that I learned from her. The first was a respect for law enforcement as she had befriended a local policeman and once when he came to visit her while on duty, she made me think they were coming to get me for something I had mischievously done. I was literally scared straight at the age of four. The other thing is a little bit personal, but I will share it anyway. I had somehow managed to get myself stuck in my zipper and it was quite uncomfortable. This was no Ben Stiller in There’s Something About Mary, but it did hurt like a son-of-a-bitch for a few moments. Maria taught me to take my time when zipping my trousers, something that has served me well my whole life.
Maria left us in Santa Monica when I was four. She stayed to marry a nice insurance agent called Curt and we were ready to fly on our own back down to Costa Rica for a few years. But Maria had been a big part of our family’s life (she even shared the same birthday as my mother), so in 1970 when we were in California as a family, we stopped to see her in Los Angeles. She was then working for the famous and iconic architects and design gurus Charles and Ray Eames. These are the industrial designers who perhaps influenced Twentieth Century Architecture and lifestyle as much or more than anyone else of their mid-Century era. We all know the ubiquitous Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman with its bent plywood and black leather.
Given that my sister was a student of architecture at Washington University (the school that threw out Charles Eames for adhering to the style of Frank Lloyd Wright before he was considered mainstream) at the time and Maria knew of my mother’s interest in the arena (we had lived in the Sixties in Wisconsin and several times visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin), she invited us to visit with her at the Eames’ home in Pacific Palisades. That home is now a National Historic Landmark for its influence on mid-Century style. What struck me in that home were three things: it had plain and simple lines, including a flat roof, it combined its style with its natural surroundings and landscape, and the home was personalized in a thousand ways to the lifestyle and memories of the Eames’. I remember sitting in the well-worn leather of the original Eames Chair and noticing that on the book shelf nearby, every shelf had little nick nacks and personal items here and there. I asked Maria about them and she declared them an important part of the Eames’ style beliefs and a real bitch to clean around each week. I even had the opportunity to talk to Ray Eames about it and she took my question very seriously. She made me watch a film that started with an up-close frame of a fly on someone’s hard. That frame broadened out to show a woman sitting on a pick Eric blanket. It kept widening out to a park in the City of Miami, which widened out to Florida on the continent and then the continent on the globe and the planet Earth in the solar system and the eventually the solar system in the galaxy, all as part of the larger universe.
We have all seen those photographic and cinematic tricks done, but this film was perhaps the first done of its kind by the Eames Studios and it was done to emphasize a key tenet of the Eames style philosophy. They believed that we all must put our mark on the universe, even in our own small and seemingly insignificant way, otherwise why are we here. Ray Eames told me that carving one’s name into a tree or a rock to memorialize a young love or a loved one passed on was critically important to mankind. We are all only here a short while and they felt that there was an imperative to imbue our surroundings with some statement of who we are and what matters to us. The knick knacks around her house were the most valued treasures she said she had because it let anyone who saw her home know something about her and it left an indelible impression that she was here, even if only for the briefest of moments.
What made me think about all this was looking around my home one morning and feeling so good about all the personalization that Kim and I have brought into our home. We are having guest this afternoon and again next week that have never seen our home. When they visit they will not go away thinking that we have a generic HGTV home that is staged and ready for sale. They may love our Knick knacks or they may hate them. They may notice them or they may not. None of that matters, what matters is that we are comforted by our personal things and they speak loudly about who we are. Kim has her mother’s Japanese pieces of art and they are very dear to her. I have my pre-Colombian artifacts and the antiquities from Latin America and Italy that I personally dug up or collected during my travels. We love our eclectic home and it gives us great pleasure to sit and enjoy it on our own or to share it with others. Everyone should have their own personalized space that tells us who they are down deep.