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Okay, so I was yammering away at Idioglossia today, and I asked the following question:
How does one fill one’s home with opulent, decadent splendour and live a headonistic, sensual, Bohemian life… without accumulating too much stuff (or debt, for that matter)?
It's weird. I keep swinging between these two extremes -- Razorblade Barebones Minimalist (although that's more of an economic necesity than anything else) and Opulent Bohemian Headonist.
I *prefer* the latter. By a significant factor.
See, I’m not actually a minimalist.
But I find that having a messy house (not enough space to tidy *away* my stuff) tends to get me down.
And I seem to have developed an unexpected coping mechanism – when things get really emotionally stressful? I get rid of stuff.
I seriously got this from my divorce.
Who knew?
This is, perhaps, why I have three boxes of “to goodwill (or wherever)” living in my house.
Besides, I long-ago developed a bit of a loathing for knick-knacks (I used to adore them. Then I had to clean. Once. That was the beginning of the end for my love-on with brickabrack).
Problem is: I still love STUFF.
I watch movies like Moulin Rouge and I just go GAGA over the jewelrypatternsfabriclaceandboningtexturesandsuperlonglashes and everything else that’s involved.
I love that stuff.
So how do I go about getting that, that headonistic opulent magnificence, without getting a tonne of clutter in the bargain.
Let me tell you a secret (it’s not even much of a secret) that I learned while I was working in the store.
People crave sensory stimulation.
A few years before I left, we had gone through an autumn and a winter of pinkpinkpinkpinkpinkpinkrosefusciaandpink. PINK! And then we got this green stuff in.
The green was lime green. Acid green. Mint green. Whatever you want to call it, it was bright and it was green.
And people went totally nuts over it.
They loved it.
But they wouldn’t buy it.
They loved the *sight* of it.
And these are people who spend their days in cubicles.
Many of them made a habit of coming to my store purely because they wanted the walls full of bright colours (and slightly nutso patterns) and the loud-enough-to-drive-you-mad pop music because they didn’t get any of that for the other eight hours they were in the building.
What I want from and love about the whole Moulin Rouge hedonist thing is the sensory stimulation.
I love the colours and textures and sounds and smells and tastes that I associate with this theme.
The way light plays on silk and silver, leather and taffeta, the way velvet absorbs it. I love the weight of stone and metal, the richness of colour found in red wine and semi-precious stones and high-quality nail polish or lipstick.
I love the smell of honey and chai spice, amber, vanilla and myrrh. I love the smell of magnolia flowers in late March, the sight of wild roses in June. I love the taste of sharp cheese, sweet ice wine, fresh berries, persimmons, mangoes and nectarines.
I love the softness of bearskin and buttery leather and peau de sois.
I love hot baths scented with essential oils, I love soap that smells like caramel and leaves its scent clinging to my skin.
So my question becomes: How do I stimulate my senses *a lot* without ramping up the clutter factor in my life?
Lesson one… is something I started figuring out in Grade six, but didn’t really start acting on until the middle of high-school. It goes like this: Wear Your Wealth.
More specifically, wear your souvenirs.
This could also be termed “Make your pretty things useful”.
When you travel, you bring stuff back. Why not make a point of choosing jewelry, clothing or functional home décor
Get super-dangly earrings, a soapstone pendant or a pair of embroidered, fur-lined mittens when you travel to the NWT, a turquoise-and-coral bolo tie or bracelet from Colorado, a silk pillowcase or a batiked shirt/table-cloth when you’re in Thailand[1]… rather than getting a soapstone statuette or a kachina figurine or a shadow puppet or what-have-you that would be bulky, require dusting, and take up space in both your suitcase and your house?
The idea is that you don’t accumulate a lot of (gorgeous but) useless stuff in your house. Rather, you accumulate a lot of gorgeous, memory-evoking, but ALSO totally in-regular-use stuff in your house so you avoid the clutter but hang onto the opulence.
For example: I have my snail table. It is a huge, wooden snail (complete with eyestalks) with a flat (and very head) glass circle across its shell for the table-top.
It is whimsical in the extreme.
It’s also a coffee table, and really damn sturdy one at that.
It’s ALSO a piece of furniture from my grandmother, which I have loved since I was 10 years old and which has always been the quintessential “Gram” object in her house.
And now it’s in my house.
And I love it.
Whimsy, uniqueness, function and personal sentiment. It fills all of these requirements. Hurrah!
Lesson two, I think, can be taken from anyone who has to make all her own stuff. Humans gravitate to beauty. If you’re in a situation where you can’t just make pretty stuff for the sake of it being pretty (portraiture on canvas, for example), you will make your *useful* stuff pretty because that way you get the useful thing and the pretty think for the same amount of work.
This lesson is: “Make your useful things pretty”.
Example: These days, I’m getting my milk in plastic bags. (This sucks ass from an environmentalist standpoint, but is definitely saving me quite a bit in terms of money, which is kind of a necessity right now. Bear with me).
I get milk in plastic bags, but I don’t use a plastic jug to serve it in. I pour the milk into a stoneware jug that lives in my fridge and is painted with bright red tulips. I am slowly (and rather to my surprise) developing a collection of unique, hand-made mugs and goblets (I’ve got a set of four hand-painted wince glasses plus two chalices and three hand-painted mugs) all of which were presents from various people). They make me smile, and I feel decadent when I use them (particularly the hand-painted stemware)[2].
The heirloom silver? Bring it out and use it. The massive teacup collection you inherited from your grandmother? Have people over for tea now and then. When it comes time to replace things in your house, keep “beautiful” in mind when you’re shopping. Grab wooden salad bowls from Value Village (or glass ones from Mikasa or Barns and Castle) rather than getting a set of plastic ones from Zellers. Bother having a fruit-bowl, and let it be made of wood or stoneware, and let it involve rich earth tones or deep jewel tones to set off the colour of the fruit itself (besides, you’ll eat more fruit if it’s sitting out and available).
If the stuff you use every day is beautiful, if it has weight and colour and elegance to some degree or other, then you are surrounding yourself with beauty as a matter of course, and it will be stuff that gets used as part of your daily life, so it won’t turn into clutter[3].
There will be more on this subject, I think. But not quite yet. (I have to go unclutter my kitchen counter. ;-)
- TTFN,
- Amazon.
[1] NOTE: I don’t use them all the time. Multiple times a year, yes. But – given my lack of a dishwasher anyway, I could conceivably use them any old day of the week just for the hell of it. I will have to get into the habit of doing this sort of thing.
[2] NOTE: If one is looking to furnish a house all in one go, places like India Imports (on Bank at Gilmour) or websites like fabindia.com can be very handy if you want the look without the travel expenses.
[3] Yes, I realize that the stuff I use in my daily life (E.G.: my jewelry collection) is currently cluttering up my house something fierce (finding/making a wall-mountable hook-screen thing from-which I could dangle my necklaces easily would be a nice way to fix this – other than the part where I’m running out of wall. For now, I suspect I’ll be tossing them all in a shoebox and going from there, but an actual jewelry box would be a very good thing to have. Possibly the kind that are actually a tool box in disguise). It’s not entirely foolproof. But it *is* a very good start.
How does one fill one’s home with opulent, decadent splendour and live a headonistic, sensual, Bohemian life… without accumulating too much stuff (or debt, for that matter)?
It's weird. I keep swinging between these two extremes -- Razorblade Barebones Minimalist (although that's more of an economic necesity than anything else) and Opulent Bohemian Headonist.
I *prefer* the latter. By a significant factor.
See, I’m not actually a minimalist.
But I find that having a messy house (not enough space to tidy *away* my stuff) tends to get me down.
And I seem to have developed an unexpected coping mechanism – when things get really emotionally stressful? I get rid of stuff.
I seriously got this from my divorce.
Who knew?
This is, perhaps, why I have three boxes of “to goodwill (or wherever)” living in my house.
Besides, I long-ago developed a bit of a loathing for knick-knacks (I used to adore them. Then I had to clean. Once. That was the beginning of the end for my love-on with brickabrack).
Problem is: I still love STUFF.
I watch movies like Moulin Rouge and I just go GAGA over the jewelrypatternsfabriclaceandboningtexturesandsuperlonglashes and everything else that’s involved.
I love that stuff.
So how do I go about getting that, that headonistic opulent magnificence, without getting a tonne of clutter in the bargain.
Let me tell you a secret (it’s not even much of a secret) that I learned while I was working in the store.
People crave sensory stimulation.
A few years before I left, we had gone through an autumn and a winter of pinkpinkpinkpinkpinkpinkrosefusciaandpink. PINK! And then we got this green stuff in.
The green was lime green. Acid green. Mint green. Whatever you want to call it, it was bright and it was green.
And people went totally nuts over it.
They loved it.
But they wouldn’t buy it.
They loved the *sight* of it.
And these are people who spend their days in cubicles.
Many of them made a habit of coming to my store purely because they wanted the walls full of bright colours (and slightly nutso patterns) and the loud-enough-to-drive-you-mad pop music because they didn’t get any of that for the other eight hours they were in the building.
What I want from and love about the whole Moulin Rouge hedonist thing is the sensory stimulation.
I love the colours and textures and sounds and smells and tastes that I associate with this theme.
The way light plays on silk and silver, leather and taffeta, the way velvet absorbs it. I love the weight of stone and metal, the richness of colour found in red wine and semi-precious stones and high-quality nail polish or lipstick.
I love the smell of honey and chai spice, amber, vanilla and myrrh. I love the smell of magnolia flowers in late March, the sight of wild roses in June. I love the taste of sharp cheese, sweet ice wine, fresh berries, persimmons, mangoes and nectarines.
I love the softness of bearskin and buttery leather and peau de sois.
I love hot baths scented with essential oils, I love soap that smells like caramel and leaves its scent clinging to my skin.
So my question becomes: How do I stimulate my senses *a lot* without ramping up the clutter factor in my life?
Lesson one… is something I started figuring out in Grade six, but didn’t really start acting on until the middle of high-school. It goes like this: Wear Your Wealth.
More specifically, wear your souvenirs.
This could also be termed “Make your pretty things useful”.
When you travel, you bring stuff back. Why not make a point of choosing jewelry, clothing or functional home décor
Get super-dangly earrings, a soapstone pendant or a pair of embroidered, fur-lined mittens when you travel to the NWT, a turquoise-and-coral bolo tie or bracelet from Colorado, a silk pillowcase or a batiked shirt/table-cloth when you’re in Thailand[1]… rather than getting a soapstone statuette or a kachina figurine or a shadow puppet or what-have-you that would be bulky, require dusting, and take up space in both your suitcase and your house?
The idea is that you don’t accumulate a lot of (gorgeous but) useless stuff in your house. Rather, you accumulate a lot of gorgeous, memory-evoking, but ALSO totally in-regular-use stuff in your house so you avoid the clutter but hang onto the opulence.
For example: I have my snail table. It is a huge, wooden snail (complete with eyestalks) with a flat (and very head) glass circle across its shell for the table-top.
It is whimsical in the extreme.
It’s also a coffee table, and really damn sturdy one at that.
It’s ALSO a piece of furniture from my grandmother, which I have loved since I was 10 years old and which has always been the quintessential “Gram” object in her house.
And now it’s in my house.
And I love it.
Whimsy, uniqueness, function and personal sentiment. It fills all of these requirements. Hurrah!
Lesson two, I think, can be taken from anyone who has to make all her own stuff. Humans gravitate to beauty. If you’re in a situation where you can’t just make pretty stuff for the sake of it being pretty (portraiture on canvas, for example), you will make your *useful* stuff pretty because that way you get the useful thing and the pretty think for the same amount of work.
This lesson is: “Make your useful things pretty”.
Example: These days, I’m getting my milk in plastic bags. (This sucks ass from an environmentalist standpoint, but is definitely saving me quite a bit in terms of money, which is kind of a necessity right now. Bear with me).
I get milk in plastic bags, but I don’t use a plastic jug to serve it in. I pour the milk into a stoneware jug that lives in my fridge and is painted with bright red tulips. I am slowly (and rather to my surprise) developing a collection of unique, hand-made mugs and goblets (I’ve got a set of four hand-painted wince glasses plus two chalices and three hand-painted mugs) all of which were presents from various people). They make me smile, and I feel decadent when I use them (particularly the hand-painted stemware)[2].
The heirloom silver? Bring it out and use it. The massive teacup collection you inherited from your grandmother? Have people over for tea now and then. When it comes time to replace things in your house, keep “beautiful” in mind when you’re shopping. Grab wooden salad bowls from Value Village (or glass ones from Mikasa or Barns and Castle) rather than getting a set of plastic ones from Zellers. Bother having a fruit-bowl, and let it be made of wood or stoneware, and let it involve rich earth tones or deep jewel tones to set off the colour of the fruit itself (besides, you’ll eat more fruit if it’s sitting out and available).
If the stuff you use every day is beautiful, if it has weight and colour and elegance to some degree or other, then you are surrounding yourself with beauty as a matter of course, and it will be stuff that gets used as part of your daily life, so it won’t turn into clutter[3].
There will be more on this subject, I think. But not quite yet. (I have to go unclutter my kitchen counter. ;-)
- TTFN,
- Amazon.
[1] NOTE: I don’t use them all the time. Multiple times a year, yes. But – given my lack of a dishwasher anyway, I could conceivably use them any old day of the week just for the hell of it. I will have to get into the habit of doing this sort of thing.
[2] NOTE: If one is looking to furnish a house all in one go, places like India Imports (on Bank at Gilmour) or websites like fabindia.com can be very handy if you want the look without the travel expenses.
[3] Yes, I realize that the stuff I use in my daily life (E.G.: my jewelry collection) is currently cluttering up my house something fierce (finding/making a wall-mountable hook-screen thing from-which I could dangle my necklaces easily would be a nice way to fix this – other than the part where I’m running out of wall. For now, I suspect I’ll be tossing them all in a shoebox and going from there, but an actual jewelry box would be a very good thing to have. Possibly the kind that are actually a tool box in disguise). It’s not entirely foolproof. But it *is* a very good start.
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