What Your Home Says About You...

One of the most important and meaningful activities we are ever engaged in is the creation of a home.

Over a number of years, typically with a lot of thought and considerable dedication, we

assemble furniture, crockery, pictures, rugs, cushions, vases, sideboards, taps, door handles

and so on into a distinctive constellation we anoint with the word home.

Our homes will not necessarily be the most attractive or sumptious environments

we could spend time in. There are always hotels or public spaces that would be a good deal

more impressive. But after we have been travelling a long while, after too many nights in hotel

rooms or on the beds of friends, we typically feel a powerful ache to return to our own

furnishings, an ache that has little to do with material comfort per se. We need to get

home to remember who we are. Our homes have a memorialising function, and what they are

helping us to remember is, strangely enough, ourselves. We can see this need to anchor

identity in matter in the history of religion. Humans have from the earliest days expended

enormous care and creativity on building homes for their gods. They haven't felt that their

gods could live just anywhere, out in the wild or as it were in hotels, they have believed

that they needed special places, temple-homes, where their specific characters could be stabilised

through art and architecture. For the Ancient Greeks, Athena was the goddess of wisdom,

rationality and harmony and in 420 BC, they completed a home for her on the slopes of

the Acropolis. It wasn't a large home – about the size of an average American kitchen – but

it was an exceptionally apt and beautiful one. The temple felt dignified but approachable.

It was rigorously balanced and logical, serene and poised. It was its inhabitant artfully

sculpted in limestone. The Greeks took such care over Athena's temple-home because they

understood the human mind. They knew that, without architecture, we struggle to remember

what we care about – and more broadly who we are. To be told in words that Athena represented

grace and balance wasn't going to be enough on its own. There needed to be a house to

bring the idea forcefully and continuously to consciousness.

Without there being anything grandiose or supernatural in idea, our homes are also temples.

It's just that they are temples to us. We're not expecting to be worshipped; but we are

trying to make a place that – like a temple – adequately embodies our spiritual values

and merits. Creating a home is frequently such a demanding process because it requires

us to find our way to objects that can correctly convey our identities. We may have to go to

enormous efforts to track down what we deem to be the ‘right' objects for particular

functions, rejecting hundreds of alternatives that would – in a material sense – have

been perfectly serviceable, in the name of those we believe can faithfully communicate

the right message about who we are. We get fussy because objects are, in their own way,

all hugely eloquent. Two chairs that perform much the same physical role can articulate

entirely different visions of life.

Le Corbusier chair; William Morris chair One chair by the Swiss 20th century architect

Le Corbusier will speak of efficiency, an excitement about the future, an international

spirit, an impatience around nostalgia and a devotion to reason. The other, by the English

19th century designer William Morris, will speak of the superiority of the pre-industrial

world, the beauty of tradition, the appeal of patience and the pull of the local.

An object feels ‘right'

when it speaks attractively about qualities that we are drawn to, but don't quite possess

strong enough doses of in our lives day to day. The desirable object gives us a more

secure hold on values that are present, yet fragile in ourselves; it endorses and encourages

important themes in us. The smallest things in our homes whisper in our ears, they offer

us encouragement, reminders, consoling thoughts, warnings or correctives, as we go about making

breakfast or do the accounts in the evening. Because we all want and need to hear such

The quest to build a home is connected up with a need to stabilize and

organise our complex selves. It's not enough to know who we are in our own minds. We need

something more tangible, material and sensuous to pin down the diverse and intermittent aspects

of our identities. We need to rely on a certain kinds of cutlery, bookshelves, laundry cupboards

and armchairs to align us with who we are and seek to be. We are not vaunting ourselves;

we're trying to gather our identities in one receptacle, preserving ourselves from

erosion and dispersal. Home means the place where our soul feels that it has found its

proper physical container, where, everyday, the objects we live amongst quietly remind

us of our most authentic commitments and loves.

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