My lovely wife says she’s defective. She’s not. She wonders what she’s missing out on by not coveting “stuff.” Our home doesn’t look like a Pottery Barn catalog or an Ikea showroom…and I think that’s okay. Because here’s what it does look like:
Featured here are paintings from China, a print of a painting we liked on what could reasonably be called one of our early dates at the Denver Art Musuem, and a radish I drew for her last summer when she was saddish.
The oh-so-Pottery-Barn faux finish that we did ourselves, photos from China, a piece of Chinese calligraphy that is not from China but nicely fits the theme…and a couple of tubes of cat medicine.
Curtains that she made herself, a Kennedy-style rocker my grandmother gave us (and that my grandparents acquired when Kennedy was actually in the White House), a world map that reminds us of all the places we haven’t been (yet), a mobile her college boyfriend made for her, flower photos that she took herself…and a cat.
Style is personal. Is our house likely to be picked for a spread in Sunset or Better Homes & Gardens? Not especially. But is it full of things with personal significance, reminders of good times and fun adventures and the people we love? I’d say so. And I’d call that style of our own making.
Personal style is…personal. It’s an entirely different thing from trendy style or classic style or hipster style or vintage style or Pottery Barn style. Personal is personal is personal, right? For some people that means bleached hair and fake tans and acrylic fingernails, for others it means clean lines and designer everything, and for some people it means braids and baseball caps and cat hair. I think the only thing worse than hating your honest-to-god personal style is cramming yourself into someone else’s idea of what you/your house should look like.