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I’m going to begin with home décor tips. I love my home décor, especially since it took very little money or effort to achieve and perfectly reflects the personality of my family.
We arrived in our home 16 years ago and plonked down all the motley furniture we have ever acquired, either from dead relatives or from shopping trips which ended not when we found the couch of our dreams, but when the kids started losing it. It’s all still there, in the same places. I call this ‘our design foundation’.
We then unpacked 80% of our boxes. The other 20%, boxes labelled things like ‘Stuff from the Lounge’, we placed in the attic we had just happily discovered.
‘Just until we get the basics sorted,’ my husband Andreas and I said to each other. Those boxes are still in the attic, despite us having moved into our house last millennium. Out of sight, out of existence… that’s my motto.
So that’s the ‘away with the stuff you don’t use’ element of decorating sorted. Now… in with the rest.
Over the last 16 years, our family has been acquiring stuff. Not necessarily on purpose. And since our attic is full of boxes, we have had to accommodate this stuff around the house. Luckily, we have an abundance of the 3 cornerstones of home decoration: mantlepieces, occasional shelving and Prestick.
Want your home to embody your family? Simply put stuff that arrives in the home on mantlepieces and shelves, while sticking up all school offerings on the walls and cupboards in the kitchen. Done.
In this vein, we have a broken lava lamp, a koala bear snow globe and a pile of miscellaneous light fiction gracing the mantlepiece in the lounge.
‘Every thought of chucking the lava lamp?’ a friend asked me recently.
‘But Andreas gave it to me!’ I protested. ‘And I love it. Well, I loved it. It ironically low lit our 30s.’
‘But it’s not doing that anymore,’ replied my friend. ‘It’s just sitting there, sadly purple, with a glob of red at the bottom.’
‘It is a Memory,’ I said firmly.
I am big on the importance of memories in home décor. You might even say they are my central design motif.
My sons are now teenagers, yet their collected artworks from 2001 – 2015 adorn the kitchen, getting more yellow and more loved every year. Political posters from university and various elections? Mildewing purposefully over the bath. Postcards picked up during overseas travels, which we planned to send to others but never did? Tacked up all over the hall. Every photo ever taken of our family that somehow got printed out by someone and sent to us? A collage in our bedroom.
‘I don’t know how you live here,’ another friend remarked recently. (She has one of those white-on-white homes, and no children.) ‘ There’s nowhere to rest your eyes! There’s just stuff everywhere!’
I smiled placidly, while I made her a coffee in a Snoopy mug my mother gave me when I was 10.
‘It’s not like that for me,’ I said. ‘I see my life everywhere I look. And I have loved my life.’
