Filed under: Your Home, Projects, Furniture
He wants to live in a minimalist space. She likes a home filled with keepsakes. Will they find decor bliss? We send them to therapy.OK, a couch in the living room I get, but do we really need a footstool? Bookshelves, sure, but a school desk from "Little House on the Prairie"? When I look around my house, I often wonder if we really need all of this extra furniture and decor that my wife has outfitted our home with.
The writer, his wife and their two-year-old daughter. Photo: Van Sias
A home should be a respite from the busy streets of New York, a calm place where you can stretch out, feel Zen. I picture Danish furniture with spare lines, cool colors and a lot of space in between every item. Blank space relaxes me. Instead, since my wife and I moved in together nearly three years ago, I feel like I'm living on some crazy intercontinental overcrowded train.
There's a Moroccan rug and a kimono hanging on the wall, a thousand travel books on wall-to-wall bookshelves, an antique school desk, a Pakistani carpet, a Chinese chest and a bright purple painting from Mexico City. There's an orange couch and red walls, plus a dining room table, end tables, a coffee table and a table for our daughter.
We only live in a one-bedroom apartment -- how is it possible we have that many tables?
The writer with the kimono his wife used to decorate one of their rooms. Photo: Van Sias
When I ask my wife Nancy about her kimono and Moroccan rug and all of those tables, she rolls her eyes. "First of all, who complains that there are too many area rugs?" she said. "The floors underneath are not beautiful -- they are laminate. And second of all, each item of furniture is piled high with your stuff, so I suspect we need more, rather than less."
Maybe it comes with spending so much time living in studio apartments over the years, where every inch was sacred and you couldn't afford to have extra furnishings. But I could do with the bare neccessities: a sofa, a chair, a light and that's about it. I acknowledge this is unrealistic when you have a 2-year-old daughter, but we could at least move closer to it. Right?
Wrong. Nancy is clearly winning the debate: She believes that beautiful things are what make a home. For a long time, before we were married and after she returned from the Peace Corps, rather than buying furniture, she would buy another plane ticket. "Why would I use this money to buy a couch when I could go to Rio?" she'd think.
But when she got her own place, she says her home became her newest journey. "My etchings from that fishing village in Morocco are in the living room," she says. "A gorgeous chest from China holds old bank statements, old letters, old pictures and now, your comic books. And the year I became a high school principal, I found an antique school desk -- you know, the kind that was bolted to the floor -- that looks great in the entryway, a perfect place for us to put the mail."
She says that every item in our house has sentimental value. "My dad passed away four years ago, but the butcher block he built is still in our dining room," she says. "I haven't been home to Maine in years, but our bed is made of beams taken from our old barn, just before it crumbled. For me, none of this is clutter. It's the fabric of my life, and now our life together. It's all essential."
Is there a way for us to merge our styles? I asked two experts: one designer and a marital counselor for help.
The counselor, a friend of ours named Carolyn Faust Piro, helps straighten out family-related issues. Her advice: Stop squabbling over something so silly. "Knowing which battles to pick is important. Save your energy for bigger and better things," she said.
"Think: Will this chair (or whatever it is) be here in 15 years?" she said. "Be able to let go!"
Designer Jason Bell took our problems a bit more seriously. I figured Bell, an old friend from high school would surely be on my side, right? Well...
He admits that couples can do a few things to merge their different styles. First, pull it all together with color. "Unify the color pallette and your space will visually mold together and seem/feel much bigger," he said. In doing this, I may not be bothered by all of the extra stuff, since it will all sort of blend together.
And what about the quadrillion tables we seem to have, I asked him. "If I were your designer, I would highly advise you to give some serious consideration to function and scale," Jason said. "From a function perspective, a living room should have three to four tables; it depends on how many seats you have."
But for Nancy and I, Jason really has some strong feelings on what we should do: Hire a designer or ask someone you both trust.
"They will be honest with you and tell you what does and doesn't work, and how to achieve a happy compromise," he says.
"It might be painful on both sides, but having that middle person solves a lot," he adds. "Sort of like a therapist, they usually only work if you are honest with them and willing to change!"
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