Decorating a House Into a Home


Decorating a home is turning a piece of property into a piece of a lifetime. Making a house into a home is like adding touches, colors, and effects; bringing things that leave a light in one's eyes into patterns, furnishings, and an ambiance that speaks to one, of one and for one. Cold and uninspiring spaces become holders of something touched hundreds of years before, a wall become a place where a painter spilled his dearest vision across a canvas. This is what a dreamt home is for many people.
When decorating a home we should ask questions. What would a poet see in a blank brick wall? What faces would a portrait artist see when looking at the kitchen tiles? Would an Africa scholar see part of the yawning yellow Savannah when gazing at a bare ground yard? There part of each of us portrays a poet, a scholar, a student of the stars, a humble viewer of nature's great majesty-this is the stuff of our dreams, the things we wish to fulfill in life. Decorating a home brings the same opportunity, make a place from a vision, and turn a dream into a reality that yet resembles the dream. Decorating a home is a reflection of self, not as others see one, but truly, as one sees his or her self.
We might seek a unifying theme for decorating a home. Perhaps a sense of family history in which gloried places would be made for portraits of ancestors, their prides and symbols of their lives; the things that make us feel yet close to them. We decorate a home with things that speak to us from earlier and days that are more difficult help us to treasure the opportunity we have now. Decorating at times becomes an act of honor, to remember those who brought us this far. We might have a place for an antique sewing cabinet, a refinished chaise with Mission-period furniture styling. This is decorating today with treasures of yesterday. Old letters and documents become framed conversations in waiting. Serving and dining articles with gold and silver plate, the original silverware from parents first home. There is a sense of gathering pieces of self in this effort, decorating a home becomes part designer work and part historian.
Now to blend the modern ideas that reflects one life and journeys. World travel, a trove of souvenirs that mean so much more than wood carvings or ceremonial masks. They are proof of happiness, and the place would be filled with the decorating a home with things that make us happy. So we ask again what would the poet do to the wall- make it breathe, in a coat of Euro-wash azure blue. What would the portrait artist see in the tiles- a well-worn path of women making life better for their families and a fresh papaya hue of orange? What would the scholar reflect of his favorite memories of nature- a vivid set of earth tones in carpets and wall pieces? There might be African cloth, carvings from India, animals photographed in the wild. Books that bear the workmanship if hand crafting. The bedroom walls where dreams will be seen again, stucco in pale blue, to look like Venetian marble.
Decorating a home is bringing past to blend with present. Tuning a piece of real estate into the peace of our deepest dreams, then pausing to consider-and dreaming again. Gathering so many widely scattered parts of out lives into colors, cloth, patterns, and that special sense of things, a personal elegance that whispers, "you are home now".




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