Find Your Own Way Home
The elements that make a home, a home
“There’s no place like home.”
”Home is where the heart is.”
”Home is not a place, it's a feeling.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot on the idea of home and how digital spaces like Instagram and Pinterest have really skewed the idea of what makes a home. This train of thought started to develop thanks to Rick Owens recent Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear show, which he hosted in his home in Paris. Located in the former French Socialist Party headquarters at Place du Palais Bourbon, which he has dubbed his “concrete palace,” the space is austere, stripped down to it’s essence, and filled sparsely with intriguing pieces of furniture and books stuffed into bookshelves. Owens’ chose to show the collection in his home as he wanted “a respectful mood in observance of the barbaric times through which we are living.” It’s a safe space, a place to welcome community, a temporary shelter from the storm.
And while Owens’ style is dramatically different from my own, I believe he and his wife Michèle Lamy have taken the same approach in how they decorate and live in their home. Taking a small step back, what I’m really trying to address here is how so many homes have lost the sense of reflecting the people who live in them. By the way, when I write “home” I mean the space you live in, be it yurt or treehouse.
For the last decade or so there has been a plague of millennial grey homes, trying to pass as minimal, though ultimately lacking in any character or charm. In my mind, what this is really demonstrates is a lack taste or personality. A home should be an outward representation of you and your family. A display of personal interests, the life you’ve lived outside your home, and the places you’ve explored. Yet we see so many reality shows or mood boards that feature nothingness, like the most banal hotel room you’ve ever visited, a void of humanity. But there are plenty of amazing examples of creatives who I think are shining examples of homes that truly reflect the individuals who live inside them.
A shining example of the idea of home, Ray and Charles Eames’ iconic Eames House, also known as Case Study House No. 8. The Eames Foundation website has a section dedicated to the collections of the Eamses, which rightly hits on what a home should be.
The Eameses looked at life as being an act of design. The residence is filled with the “stuff” of their living. The stuff that tells the story of their lives, interests and loves. Intangibles of color and form. Careful arrangements of objects and flowers, whose value is really based upon being part of the collections. And as some might feel, the stuff that transmutes a structure into a home.
That’s the thesis, right there. If your home doesn’t contain the “stuff” of your life, then it’s merely a container to eat and rest. It’s also important to note that a home doesn’t need expensive items to feel special. But so much of a home these days is filled with capitalist objects, cartoon characters or sports logos. Or on the flip side, buying an 11 lb. Tom Ford book as a false marker of style. These are brand advertisements.
When I think of a more modern approach to the home, Emily Bode and Aaron Aujla’s New York apartment springs to mind. Now converted into a fine-tailoring studio, the space is filled with trinkets and treasures, items they made (like the hand-painted couch!) and other knick-knacks. In the video interview with Vogue below, Aaron clearly describes why his home is a home.
This apartment is a reflection of kind of the things that Emily and I have collected over the years, but also the things that we’ve made, and different iterations of things that we made that’s just kind of find itself at home here. It’s kind of ever changing and ever evolving.
He brings up a great point, that spaces are meant to change as we change. A space being a reflection of our lives. I think that’s why traveling and exploring is so important, it opens your eyes to a bigger picture. And bringing home parts of those experiences can then open up stories to those visiting our homes, and perhaps influencing their lives as well. It’s all connected.
You speak my language
Waiting very patiently to finally start restoring our place in Portugal …then it’s unleash the containers that store the stories of countries lived and people met no minimalistic space being created