Reply #17: I agree with you on the 'what is classy' thing... [View All]

[TygrBright]

...if I may tell a little story, here.

I always tell people I don't "decorate," I just "arrange." That is, I don't buy stuff that "matches," I buy stuff that I need, and (occasionally) that I really, really like. None of it goes with any of it, although when I replace things like bath towels or bedding if it wears out, I pay attention to what colors are already there in the room, etc. Be that as it may, I generally end up with something that is clean and pleasant and welcoming.

One time a couple of years after we moved into our first home, we had a visit from an old friend of my spouse's, who stopped by to consult on a book chapter they were collaborating on. Up until then, we'd always met at restaurants. They spread their stuff out in the dining room and spent the day on it, making periodic visits to the kitchen to fill plates from the refrigerator, and when they were done I booted them into the family room to talk old times while I cleaned up the dining room and put together something for supper. When it was over and the friend was leaving, he turned to my spouse and said, "You don't know how lucky you are. This place is SO cool."

This baffled us since we knew that he and his wife had recently moved into a VERY upscale subdivision in the Baltimore suburbs, a fancy all mod cons new huge house, and ours was a 1950s brick Cape Cod in a small town with nothing at all extraordinary about it. But we thanked him. That year, he invited us for dinner to their new house over the holidays, which they dual-celebrated because he is nominally Christian and he'd married into a liberal Reform Jewish family, so the kid got a little of everything.

We walked into their house and his wife showed us around, obviously extremely pleased with the house and how it was decorated, which was sort of a cross between Martha Stewart and Town & Country. VERY 'home beautiful,' VERY gracious, big comfy upholstered furniture with matching slipcovers, silk flower arrangements everywhere in colors that complemented the draperies, magazines and coffee-table books arranged at just the right casual angle on the tables, etc. We made suitably admiring comments because our Moms brought us up right.

While she was fixing dinner, he took us up to the ONE room she hadn't included on the tour, which was his office/study, which had been carved out of a SMALL bedroom upstairs. It was jammed to the gills with his guitar collection, his books and memorabilia, a tiny TV/VHS player and stereo and his music and tape collections, etc. It was kind of crowded, but it was comfortable in a way the rest of the house simply WASN'T. I realized that the poor guy spent EVERY MINUTE he spent in that house, except when he was eating or sleeping, in that one little room. It was the only room he could do anything in. He loved our house, not because of the way it looked (which was nothing special,) but because they could spread their stuff on the dining room table and work together in comfort, they could raid the fridge and hang out in the kitchen for a break, they could kick back in the family room, we could have a relaxed after-dinner coffee in the living room, etc., and neither he nor my spouse ever felt like they couldn't set their stuff down there, or couldn't bring a drink into that room, or couldn't put their feet up, or whatever.

So thereya go. In my book, "classy" has much less to do with how things look than with how a place feels. Clean is classy, but ultra-neat, don't-set-that-coffee-cup-down is not classy. Find the line between relaxing and slobby, between welcoming and artificial. Fresh air is good. Natural light is good. Not too much clutter, but a friendly relaxed attitude toward the stuff of daily living is good. Anything looks nice on the walls if it's kept dusted, carefully placed, and obviously of value to, or a reflection of, the person who put it there.

didactically,
Bright