Storytelling
I’ve always loved spaces that feel like they’ve been lived in for a long time. Not in a worn-out way, but in the sense that the things inside them clearly belong to the people who live there. I love walking or driving through neighborhoods at night when the lights are on inside people’s homes. From the street you can see these little glimpses through the windows. Shelves with books, lamps glowing next to chairs, art on the walls. You don’t know the details, but you can sense that each house holds its own collection of stories.
With each home, those stories usually live in the way people use its spaces, and from the objects held within. A mug from a favorite coffee shop that somehow became the one everyone reaches for. A bowl that only comes out when friends come over. A small rock a child insisted on bringing home that now lives on a windowsill. The reading corner where kids curl up in dad’s lap to hear their bedtime books read aloud. The place where all the backpacks land at the end of the day.
Those kinds of things build slowly over time. Usually without much planning. Here are just a few of my stories.
One of my favorite pieces in our living room is a stark royal blue pen lithograph titled Andre Siden, which means “Other Side” in Norwegian. Brett and I found it in a tiny art shop on our last trip abroad before we had kids. The shopkeeper didn’t speak any English and we didn’t speak Norwegian, but we managed with a lot of gesturing and smiling. We bought the print and had it wrapped in a tube to mail home. A few months later it showed up at our door, and to be honest, there were times we wondered if it ever would. It now sits above the mantel, and I’ve decorated in a way that incorporates blue specifically to include it, even though I would never decorate with blue otherwise. Every time I see it, I think about that little shop in Norway, the strange game of charades it took to get it back home, and a chapter in my life where adventure was king.
Our shelves also hold a mix of thrifted books. Beautiful book covers draw me in like a moth to a flame; but beautiful covers plus useful information inside are my absolute weakness. Beekeeping, gardening, forestry, interior design, architecture, botany, biology, knot tying, homesteading… the list goes on and on. Please don’t ask me how many I have actually read because the answer is almost none of them. Who has time these days? I keep telling myself, “one day.” Truthfully I don’t know if that day will ever come. What I can guarantee, is that these books will be added to and shifted around for eternity because it makes my soul happy.
On the mantel there’s a brass clock. I almost never look at it… except in the mornings when I’m packing school lunches at the kitchen island (eight feet away in my itty bitty house) and it suddenly becomes the most important thing in my life. I don’t have a free hand to check my phone clock, and the kids and I are the constantly-on-the-verge-of-being-late kind of bunch at 6:30am. I take on the very important job of announcing, “you have five minutes to finish your breakfast”… like clockwork, as it were. The chunk of amethyst that rests below the clock is Brett’s prized item from his childhood rock collection, a reminder that though time is fleeting, it can be filled with beauty and things that we love.
There’s a marble pothos next to the clock that I’ve had for over ten years. I used to give my plants names, and this one is named "Paarthurnax” (as in from Skyrim - long story) It is one of the first plants I ever owned. Before that I had never nurtured anything beyond myself. Somehow it survived, and slowly it grew. It’s had ups and downs like the rest of us, but that’s ok. My love for plants has continued, and I very much enjoy watching them slowly take over corners of the house. And this particular plant reminds me that I grew as a person, learning that I had a lot more to give to the world, and that I can and will continue to grow with each new stage of life. We joke that the plants gave confidence for having dogs and the dogs gave confidence for having kids, but it’s true. We call this the zone of proximal development; it’s a big thing in our household, and we prioritize this mode of being all the time.
On our sideboard sits our record player and a stack of very miscellaneous albums. Who knew you could buy Smashmouth’s Astro Lounge on vinyl? And that it would be lime green and bright purple?? In the evenings before bed our family of four will very often put one on and have a dance party in the living room to shake our sillies out. I love the way records change the way we listen to music. You put one on and listen to whatever comes next. No skip, no repeat, just listen to the whole album as it comes and as it was designed. There are several albums from my past that hold special meaning to me for the full album: the one I listened to on repeat to help me get over the worst high school breakup, the one where I put it in headphones during architecture school when I needed to focus and get work done at 3am, the one I play when I can’t sleep at night because my mind won’t be still. It’s like they’re stories of their own, and they unlock something for me in a way individual songs never quite do. As a wise man once said… “well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’.” Which, honestly, feels truer every year.
The coffee table is a little unorthodox, but I love it so much. I have a big soft spot in my heart for antique furniture that seems to ooze with history. I found this piece on Facebook Marketplace and drove an hour and a half to meet the woman selling it. It’s a cobbler’s bench from the 1800s. If only this piece of furniture could talk, right? True to its original purpose, it’s a workhorse in our house. It’s the place where the kids sit when I put shoes on their feet and Band-Aids on their boo-boos. It’s been stood on many a time, and it has a drawer where I store our card games. Somehow, it just feels like it’s sturdy enough to last another hundred years. I very much wish I could decorate it with a nice tray like every Pinterest image ever, but I can’t because said tray would inevitably be in danger from the children and the dogs’ tails. Someday. No-tray coffee table is just a part of my current story.
The sofa and matching chair in the room were the first “grown-up” furniture we bought after getting married. Truly - it was our first big purchase to make together, and the hardest thing we had yet encountered in our relationship - ha. At the time we had about a thousand dollars to our name and an empty apartment with nowhere to sit. The kicker was, we had both just graduated from architecture school. We thought we had taste, we didn’t have Facebook Marketplace, and furniture is expeeeensive. I think we argued in every furniture store in the Denver metro area. But then we found them. They were floor models, and the sofa had a ripped seam. We thought they were beautiful, and the very best part was that we could afford them. Brett learned an upholstery whipstitch so he could repair the sofa. You would never notice now, and they still look (almost) as good as the day we bought them a decade ago. I think I will cry when we finally have to get something new. We did learn a lesson the day we bought them, one that we will pass on to our children…. when you go furniture shopping, don’t do it in a t-shirt and jeans because nobody will pay attention to you or help you because they will assume you are poor and they’ll be right. Just kidding - the lesson is, when you want people to take you seriously, you have to look and act the part. So now I wear a blazer when I go furniture shopping - and when networking.
None of these things is particularly valuable, at least in a quantifiable way. They are definitely not “by the book” when it comes to design. But they hold pieces of our life, and they bring us joy to use them and look at them. They hold value to me.
If you looked closely around our house, you would probably find plenty of things that a design book would tell you not to do. Colors that don’t perfectly coordinate. Furniture that wasn’t part of a master plan. Objects that ended up somewhere simply because that’s where they landed one day and then never moved again.
But when I look around the room, I don’t really see those things. I see the trip where we found the lithograph. I see the books I want to read someday. I see the plant that somehow survived my early attempts at keeping things alive. I see the place where the kids sit to get their shoes on, the couch where we collapsed after long days in our twenties and took turns sleeping the night when we had tiny crying babies. I see the corner where we dance before bed.
Over time those things start to layer together. None of them were chosen because they matched each other. They just arrived in our lives one by one and found their place.
I think that’s how most homes actually grow. Not all at once, but slowly. This is what I want to help foster in the homes I design: spaces that aren’t just pretty, but full of life, full of stories, and full of meaning for the people who actually live there. And if someone happens to walk by or drive past at night, I hope they can peek in through the windows and catch a glimpse of these stories being told.
