I am a peeping Thomasina. I look in people’s windows. Do you do this?
I’m not interested in the people – I’d rather they not be there, so I can look more openly. I want to see their house. I want to see the color of their walls, the size of their tv and where they put it.* Curtains, or no? Children’s toys? If so, are they all over the floor or neatly in a box in the corner? How big is the kitchen, how new the appliances, is the ceiling smoothly plastered or naked beams? Do they have – shudder of pleasure – an entire interior wall of brick?
Southern Living magazine’s Ideal Houses issues are my porn. Better Homes and Gardens is my indulgence. I have a file of magazine clippings of beautiful things I one day want to own, and beautiful ways I one day want to display them in my House Beautiful. I love old linens, I love closets and built in shelves, I love paint chips and carpet samples and Murphy’s Oil, which I dream of rubbing into an old treasured newel post on an old treasured staircase in my old treasured house.
My dreams of our future are myriad, involving perfection in time management and organization and the perfect mix of child activities and nice solid reliable always-clean cars and buying gifts for people just because and regular dates-with-spouse and finding time for public service and some kind of regular music or theatre performance and yearly vacations. These dreams all get sort of bound up in houses, for some reason. It’s a harmless fiction that I allow myself – that if I just get the house of my dreams, I will realize the rest of my dreams with ease. I wonder if it is tied to my military upbringing, the transience of my early days, my later days, all my days. My parents both grew up exceedingly poor, ours is not a family of treasured heirlooms, of piles of monogrammed linens. They have roots, much rootier than my roots, but these roots are not manifest in stuff. Intellectually, morally, I think this is good. Stuff is just stuff, baggage, blah blah rant-on-consumerism and the average American debt load blah etc.
But something in my domestic little heart just goes gaga over old silver or antique furniture. I am interested in co-opting other people’s history, I guess. I want the pile of monogrammed linens, even if they hold someone else’s initials.
Anyway. I got caught staring at this guy’s gorgeous dark wood built in shelves yesterday. He gave me A Look. Dude. If you don’t want people salivating over your decor, perhaps you should shut the blinds when it’s dark outside and all your lights are on.
*I think the way that people arrange their television, books, and furniture in a room that has a fireplace really says a lot about them.
I’ll say I’m anti-stuff, but really, I’m really pro-nice stuff. I’d rather have a few things I love than a lot of things I tolerate.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the fireplace-TV-books-furniture thing. I have very definite thoughts on what I like in a room with a fireplace, but I don’t know what I think that says about people.
I’m totally a voyeur like that! I might have to read this post to my husband so he thinks I’m less weird. When we drive by houses in our neighborhood at night, I make him slow down so I can get a good, long look. I just love seeing what colors people paint with, the art they hang, the furniture they buy and how well they construct a room out of all that. And then I make sure my blind are always closed because the hodge-podge of furniture and mish-mash of art/pictures on my bare walls in our rented apartment is depressing enough for me to look at; no need to subject outsiders to that!
by the way, I just read it to him. He said it doesn’t make me seem less weird, but it does tell him that there is a forum for me to get help.
k – It’s all based on what gets the room’s focus. Basically, if you point your furniture toward the tv and away from the fireplace, you watch too much tv. If you turn the furniture toward the fireplace and the tv is in an out of the way corner, you are a pretentious snob. If you have your room setup so that you can easily focus on either, then you are just like me, and so you must be super smart and fabulous and have the perfect intellectual/reading/fireside chatting vs. tube-watching balance. And if you hang a gorgeous flat screen above the fireplace, then you have way more money than I do and I hate you.
But if you put the tv on the hearth and block the fireplace altogether? You are dead to me.
And LEO? You are very normal, just like me. Unless you don’t have your living room furniture set up the way I do, and then you’re weird.
*Let it be known, we have a fireplace, but it’s bricked up, so I filled it with twinkle lights that I thought was a charming idea but now I never bother to flip them on.