We should all stop and smell the roses

Thoughts on the beauty surrounding us

There’s a debate going on in my household (aka between Andy and me) on whether or not I talk a lot. It was only when I spent the entire fifteen minute walk home from the grocery store with him, trying to explain the difference between Georgian and Edwardian houses and making such a mess of it that I ended up saying “Georgian-Edwardian” in the hope that he’d understand I actually meant Georgian when I was trying to make the point that they’re so much nicer than Victorian houses – that I realised Andy might actually be right. (He thinks I am a “chatterbox”.)¹

How cool is this house? And how cool is it that it’s next to all these other houses??

A week later, on another walk with a friend, I was back at it – pointing at houses, debating whether I’d choose this house over that one, imagining different front door colors, or lamenting about how nice this house was but I couldn’t possibly live there because its garden wasn’t south facing – when he said, “Is this what it’s like walking around neighborhoods with Dreamspaces?”

It’s important, I think, to be aware of your surroundings design-wise. My very first design professor in college (“uni” for my Europeans), gave us an assignment that she swore would “change us forever”. We had to come to the next class armed with 100 photos, from our daily life, of fonts and signage that we’d see around. “Change my life,” I thought, “Sure”.

This one really haunted me…I had frozen yogurt for lunch and dinner for my entire freshman year, with this little cat staring down at me to and fro.

It was wild. My life actually changed. I was snapping everything: the numbers above the classrooms, words chiseled into the statues, the bushes in front of the library spelling out “USC” (my favorite lol), the hand-drawn signs on fruit stands on the corner of the street, the way my stats professor would write “alpha” (that one just stumped me tbh), my frozen yogurt place and the placards for the different toppings and flavors (I got desperate), the Felix car dealership sign on the way to said frozen yogurt place…It opened up a whole new area of my brain. Awareness! What a gift!!

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We’re all familiar with “holiday blues”, right? I’ve been feeling it, mixed in with a few other emotions, since the highs of my summer trips. Travelling is amazing – you’re exposed to new environments, new routines, new people, new cultures, new food, new, new, NEW.

It’s refreshing, rejuvenating, invigorating, inspiring, and then…poof!

You’re home, surrounded by things so familiar that you can almost feel that newfound motivation, those new ideas, your new outlook on life slowly seep out of you…kind of like how the water drips out of the leaky kitchen faucet you almost forgot about.

Here is everything I loved from my (first) visit to the V&A Storehouse. It’s the V&A’s public storage facility, storing hundreds of thousands of objects not currently on display at the main museum.

Last weekend my friend was in London for the day, and we went to the V&A Storehouse. I’d already been to the opening, and again a few weeks later when another friend was passing through, making this my third visit since it opened in May.

But there is something so nice about going back to the same places. Not only is it quite chic to find comfort and familiarity in a museum, but also it freed my headspace to look around and notice new things.

A few pieces had rotated, and we stopped to watch a conservation video on a screen that I’d always skipped past. I was glad to have tuned in this time, as we slowly realised that the young woman in the video, who was showing us how she mixed a paste together, sieved it, and let it rest until it turned gummy, had actually made her own glue?? Which she then used a small, precise brush to apply her hand-made glue to a tiny piece of very specific Japanese paper, and stuck it onto a small tear in a post-it note, thus repairing it, in a manuscript that was not even twenty years old. She didn’t even remove the post-it note from the manuscript during the whole repair. It was the craziest thing I’d seen all day.²

And from there, we walked through Victoria Park to have lunch at Cafe Cecilia, the exact walk and meal that I had spontaneously done the weekend before with Andy.

But I assure you, the whole day was a totally different experience.

Xoxo

Isabelle

1. I continued, “Georgian-Edwardian houses are just so chic, almost too chic, you know they were so good at making the proportions perfect? Even if the room was massive it would still feel cosy…do you think it’d be almost too hard to live in one, could one actually relax, living in a Georgian-Edwardian house, surrounded by so much chic-ness?" This is when Andy finally tuned in, looked at me with concern and said, “No.”

What actually is a Georgian house?

A gorgeous Georgian townhouse. And here’s an absolutely amazing Georgian house in the English countryside.

This is how I recognise a Georgian home, whether an estate, cottage or townhouse:

• Symmetry, both in the facade and in the layout of the home.

• Sash windows, rather than casement windows (sash windows go up and down, casements are on hinges)

• Ionic and Corinthian pilasters and columns around the entry doors, a very nice decorative touch

The overarching consensus of Georgian homes is that the balanced proportions really do provide a sense of unassuming ease and comfort, thus making them an ideal home.

2. Said friend just messaged me saying, “They recruited employees for the order and object team (no previous experience needed) by asking them to tell them about an object they own(ed) and how they took care of it and kept it safe”. This woman was obviously a conservationist with previous experience, but still. What a perfect way to recruit.