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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

09.04.2000

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other recent LOUNGE articles:
o The Great Roommate Search
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the Dining Chair Slipcover Debacle
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Post-Posters: Better Ideas for Dressing Bare Walls
o 10 Tips for Furniture Foraging

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Style & Stylishness |  1 2 3
continued from page 2

Sometimes the objects I love are frivolous. One autumn day several years ago, I spied an $86 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew with which I promptly became smitten. It was an adorable anthropomorphic winged corkscrew. The dress was meant to slip around the neck of a wine bottle; you turned her head to screw into the cork, and her arms would slowly rise. Once her arms had reached their maximum height, you’d plunge them back down to her sides; with that one elegant swoop, out popped the cork. (Hmm, as I write this, it’s suddenly making me blush …) It was too delightfully clever for words; cute, but this being an Alessi product, still streamlined and chic. I coveted that corkscrew, and hinted and hinted about how dearly I wished I could afford my newfound obsession, until come Christmastime, my brother presented me with an Anna of my very own.

Much as I adore that corkscrew, it’s still not my favorite object in the kitchen. That honor belongs to a pair of potholders, hand-quilted by my Mom and given to me for Christmas, just before I moved out to Tucson. There’s a navy-blue-edged one and a maroon-edged one, stitched together from a crazy mélange of fabrics, many of which I recognize as remnants from clothing she made for me as a child. They don’t match a thing in the rest of my house – I’ve got a bias towards bold colors and pure solids-- but I display them proudly nonetheless. Sometimes the beauty of an object isn’t anything external, but inherent in less immediately-visible factors – who made it, how you acquired it, what it means to you.

A lamp, a bookend, a corkscrew, two potholders – little things, really, but they’re what I think of when I think about my decorating style. It’s the objects that have shaped my style – a predilection towards clean lines, an appreciation of clever design, an inordinate fondness for yellow, a weakness for objects with a story – never the other way around, with the style dictating which objects I’ll display in my home. Some days, I’ll be flipping through Martha Stewart Living or some other such rag and the inferiority complexes will start plaguing me. But mostly, I think people have it all wrong when they look towards books and magazines and interior decorating experts to tell them how they can best achieve that stylish home of their dreams. Stylishness is a matter of being trendy, fashionable, in tune with the latest and the hippest, then adapting your look to suit. Stylishness is about someone else telling you what you're supposed to like;  you can learn stylishness through a book, buy stylishness via an interior decorator, and what you'll end up with is a home that's all superficial beauty, no personality. Having style, on the other hand, is about figuring out what it is that you like, pure and simple.

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