I try to approach interior decorating with a sense of intellectual rigor. My rules are strict and relentless. In this, my first blog, I intend to discuss where those rules come from, why they are important, and how we can beautify and uplift our own spaces by applying them. But, along with all those lofty principles, a dash of whimsy is needed. Every room should have something to bring us joy. There should be a smile in every room.
My husband and I have two residences: a very small NYC apartment and an old farmhouse nestled alongside a river in Massachusetts. The shoebox dimensions of the apartment have taught me much about the conscious and efficient use of space. It is in the much larger country house that we can afford to fully indulge in whimsy: placing objects and assembling collections whose only purpose is to delight us.
I have listed some of my favorite touches:
Carnivorous Plants
Carnivorous plants are the whimsies of the botanical world. We raise more than twenty varieties in two terrariums by the living room window.
Sometimes in the sunlight, we can see the hairs and red veins on the pitcher plants (Sarracenia, Nepenthes and Heliamphora) and the spittle-like mucilage gleaming on the sundews (Drosera). One plant appears as a parrot and another a cobra (Darlingtonia californica). A couple of the pitchers have leaves that look like mustaches and beards.
Their modes of entrapment are nectar mouthed pits, stickiness or movement. The orchid-like flowers of the bladderworts (Utricularia) work like miniature vacuum cleaners, creating suction when their hairs are triggered. All these plants look and act feral.
Above the terrariums, the framed quote of Charles Darwin echoes our obsession. In 1860, he noted his first encounter with the sundew on an English heath. He wrote, “I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world.
Found Objects
A large, barn-red newel post is the first thing visitors notice in our entrance hall. It must have come from the staircase of some massive Victorian House. Yet, without attachment to stairs or spindles, it simply stands there, doing nothing.
A nearby table displays an oddball assortment of found objects, some of them quite rusty. When gardening, I’m always finding some artifact from the past: a horseshoe, a hinge from the barn burned by lightning, a pair of scissors that looked perfectly good to me, a monogrammed silver spoon handle, old jars and bottles, shards of broken china. The remains of a rusty truck sticking out of a hole near the river suggest that there was once a dumpsite on our property, yet the objects I find in the garden were not deliberately discarded.
The items were dropped or lost as people went about the business of life.
I enjoy speculating about these people—those who, a century or two ago, walked, lived on and cared for the land that now is entrusted to us.
(Yes, we own it legally, but no one can own anything metaphysically, especially land. We consider ourselves stewards of the property until it passes to someone else.) There are feelings of connection to those people from a long time ago through the collection of archeological finds.
Another Bit of Whimsy
Another source of historical speculation is the roll top desk from around the turn of the 20th century. My husband and his ex-wife bought it from a linen company in the Empire State Building. It stayed with her for thirty years until she sold her house. To keep it in the family, we took it to the farmhouse.
As we were moving it, I noticed that one of the small cubbies was locked. Though nobody had ever remarked on this before, once pointed out, everyone became very keen to discover its contents. When it was being readied for the moving truck, they madly tried to pick the lock with credit cards and paper clips, but to no avail.
To this day, the cubby remains sealed. Though I do want to open it one day, I am not going to break it or pay a locksmith to travel to the countryside. We allow clever guests to try to pick the lock but are quite content when they fail. Not knowing what the cubby holds allows our fantasies to run wild. My husband dreams that one day we will find a single share from the original issue of IBM stock.
Framed Chuckles- A Smile in Every Room
The farmhouse dates back to a time when people were smaller than they are now. Narrow stair steps accommodate only the colonial size foot, and I sometimes think that the plumbing can only accommodate the turn-of-the century colon. Our wells are shallow, and the waste pipes narrow. So, to address our embarrassing problems when guests come (how do we put this in a delicate way?), I printed up a sign. It is in an old-fashioned font, placed in an ornate gold frame, hung near the toilet paper and reads:
If your gift back to
the earth is bountiful,
please start flushing right away.
Twice is fine. The plumbing is narrow.
Also, please make sure the water
stops running before you leave.
Unattended, it will drain the well.
We never had a plumbing problem again, and everyone leaves the bathroom with a giggle.
Robots Always Make Me Smile
I started buying wind-up toys to cheer a friend who was going through a difficult emotional time. Each time I bought one for him, my inner-child bought one for myself. Long after my friend was feeling better, I kept on buying them. Robots are my favorite toy.
To be “serious” about collecting vintage toys, we are supposed to treat them like museum pieces, keeping them in cellophane-covered boxes and placing them on a high shelf, out of the reach of children. Not me. I play with my robots, and let children play with them too. Nothing is better than seeing all 64 robots wound up and running around with their flashing lights and flying disks, along with their cacophony of beeping and whirring sounds.
Such mayhem is not prudent, for toy robots have become quite collectible. I saw one of my earliest finds, bought for under two dollars, now going for 200 Euros in a Brussels antique store. Another of my robots is marked with the Cyrillic initials of the old Soviet Union. The shopkeeper told me to take really good care of it because the political changes brought on by the demise of the Iron Curtain would make the toy quite rare. Wouldn’t you know, I played with it and yes, it got somewhat damaged.
Robots and the Purpose of Life – A Smile in Every Room
To me, robots are more than a whimsical pastime. They are a philosophy of life. They are about movement and change, a hard thing for me to accept. Robots remind me of Emerson’s Law of Circulation, which is not just about giving and receiving but also about the ever-changing nature of reality. Robots must move; they must be played with, even if it compromises their capital value. It is samasara, the Buddhist word for ceaseless motion. When the monk was asked, “What is the Tao?” he, Yun-men, answered, “Walk on!”
Walking off, however, is quite another matter. One night, Gort (from The Day the Earth Stood Still) who lives with the other robots in our bedroom, startled us awake by walking off his shelf, as if of his own volition. Sometimes a residual spring action causes wind-up toys to move. Gort damaged his visor in the fall, so to prevent further casualties, we added a narrow wooden bumper to the edge of the shelf.
The Impermanence of Whimsy
The boxes the wind-up toys originally came in add to their value as collectibles and are charming in themselves, with their vintage ‘40’s and ‘50’s graphics. I keep them in the basement and will reunite each robot with its box when I pass them on to my grandchildren. At least, I hope I will do so, for nature has whims of its own.
In 2011, we almost lost the house when the nearby river flooded our property during Hurricane Irene. Had the waters reached the house, the carnivorous plants would have perished, we would never know the contents of the locked desk cubby, and the robots would have been buried under mud and rock to be lost forever. Or maybe, two hundred years later, someone would stub their foot on a bit of protruding metal, unearth the rusting object with its mysterious flecks of residual color, its barely legible print and wonder,
“What is this….
What was it used for…
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WIND UP TOYS: Amazon is a great source for wind-up toys but make sure the descriptor says tin, not plastic. Try Schylling.
CARNIVOROUS PLANTS: I love California Carnivores
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