As a designer, writer, and general observer of the human condition, I find life the amusing, perplexing trip we're on together. Gview is a bit of buzz, advice, opinion, trendwatching, cultural criticism, and musings. No passport required, so check in regularly.
Mining Design Schizophrenia
In my first house, I converted a corner of the kitchen into a built-in desk. A cauliflower shaped mug was filled with pens. A Deco sculpture was ballast for notebooks, and a classic wall phone was installed to add surface space and nostalgia. I stretched the phone cord to its limit to avoid writing at the desk in the corner. But, I never asked myself why…
Instead, I shifted my focus to transforming a spare room off the kitchen into a study. The carpenter was back to build bookcases, and four coats of paint dried before the walls were the right red. In went an old armchair, and a chaise longue upholstered in a luxurious grey woven cheetah print. A Jacobean desk was positioned against the wall, and hours were spent hanging prints of ancient ruins above it. As I stepped back into the opening to admire the canvas, my stomach lurched: this was a study propped to test pilot a tweedy writer with a mordant wit, not a piquant designer staking her plot of bohemia.
Ponder my mistakes? Strike the over designed set? Neither. Instead, exhausted, dazed, and confused I dove straight for that chaise longue (my La-z-boy in waiting) with a book and a glass of wine, seduced by my own mistake. Napping, reading, listening to music, entertaining friends…The chaise also proved a comfortable spot from which to gaze at the prints over the dark, lonely desk. The red room revealed itself as a sexy salon, and I relished every recline.
Still seeking a place to write, I wandered the rooms like Heathcliff searching for Catherine. The space was there, but when an approach is all design and no feeling the right space remains terra incognito. Still blocked a year later, I shifted my overdrive to the bumped out kitchen wall, now a bay window overlooking the wooded back yard. A vintage trestle table, with decades of paint on its wooden base and a red linoleum top was set in the bay and that’s when my cloud lifted. Drawn to that table like a magnet I realized where I needed to be to work: in front of a window.
After I left that house for a tiny cottage and its acre of garden, I didn’t have an inch to spare for an office. I also found it didn’t matter. Time flew when I worked at the dining room table with its window of natural light, its view of disheveled green. When the cottage grew to a four-bedroom home - all of which had windows with pastoral views – I snagged one for my office. Again, months were spent on the paint colors, furnishings, art work and desk until it was camera ready. Then the new computer arrived, forcing me to move the desk from the window to the wall. Immediately, the room went from good to bad, and the walls sprouted writer’s block like mold before my own eyes.
Eventually, I would have my nervous breakthrough, channeling all I’d gleaned from my no-self-included design schemes. Yet, by then all I could do was scream, grab my notes, run downstairs, and grip the (window facing) kitchen table. This time...a streamlined mid-century oval with a chrome trimmed, faux marble Formica top.