Birth, death, the gift of time in between, and, accompanying each life stage, a home.
Just think of the various rooms, dormitories, apartments and (or) houses that punctuate the trajectories of our lives. There’s the earliest kiddie-lair foisted upon us by parents who think ducks, lambs and assorted furry vermin are the zenith of sub-6-year-old taste. There’s the more personally defined space we defiantly carve out as teenagers, dependent on posters and piles of clothes. There are the starting-out rental apartments with hand-me-down couches; the first purchased home with upgraded furnishings; the family home with rooms to grow into; the weekend home; the retirement home.
For every stage of life, there’s a place where we live that in some way helps define that moment. (Often we glide from one stage to another with little thought or awareness.) At other times, those moments of transition are most poignant and memorable. A case in point: Years ago, I was moving into my first, real, grown-up apartment after the impersonal dorms of college. This tiny, simple, rented space seemed to me like a vast, gaping maw demanding to be filled with grown-up stuff that didn’t need to be assembled with little plastic pegs or hung on the walls with thumbtacks. For the first time in my life, I craved good-looking things that would proclaim the graduated, adult me. I just wanted to pack that joint with style.
Meanwhile, miles away, my 80-something grandparents were scaling down into an easy-to-manage smaller home that could never accommodate the lifetime of objects they had lovingly acquired. It was a fortuitous collision of two phase-changes: the side chairs, bundles of old table linens, candlesticks and artworks sloughed off by my elders for practicality’s sake instantly propelled me onto a whole new design stratum. I was amassing for my future; they were reducing for theirs. And I was very aware that one day, I would be passing through the slough-off phase too, perhaps with some eager relative or friend awaiting the fallout.
Stages are meant to be passed through, for better or worse, and these days my home offers only a glimpse of its former lan. The cosmopolitan decor segued into what even the clueless would recognize as Early Toddler, with every surface bearing witness either by what’s there (plastic toys, cardboard books, Play-Doh, half-eaten graham crackers) or by what’s not (every breakable object or possible choking hazard, removed from view two years ago to somewhere well beyond reach). I’m now beginning to anticipate the next, post-preschool-dervish phase when I scrape off the crayons, break out the Pledge and reacquaint myself with wood finishes and tassel fringe.
But notwithstanding such evidence as play sets in the parlor, or maybe a futon on the floor with “Beavis and Butt-head” videos nearby, do you think you could walk into a home and know if the inhabitant is single, coupled, childless or empty-nesting? Could you pinpoint the inhabitant’s age within a decade? It’s an interesting exercise, decoding decor: Look around your own home and see if it announces your particular stage of life.
“How anyone chooses to live at any point is such a personal thingI don’t think you can ever really generalize about it,” said Steven Wagner, who then proceeded to do so. This former editor of Metropolitan Home magazine and current vice president of Home Arts Program Development for Hearst Media has scouted thousands of homes all over the world in the last 20 years, and if stages of life are evident in decorating, this is the fellow who would know.
“I suppose there are obvious clues: The absence of walls or doors in a loft is always a dead giveaway to the fact there are no children, for instance. And I could usually tell when a couple had just moved in together, too. They’d be less secure about their own taste, how it stacks up to their mate’s, and they’d often try to hold on to all the trappings of their previous, single lives, no matter how awful.
“Merged households can look really atrocious, with weird mixes of things if the tastes are dissimilar. But eventually the couple learns to build a style together. Or one of them just takes complete control.”
Wagner personally opposes the idea that a young single person with little handy cash has to be a tasteless bumpkin relying on “Mom’s Scandinavian dining set and whatever turns up at the flea market. For lots of people, the home has to be personal, welcoming and sophisticated, no matter what age or stage of life you’re in. My very first apartment was tiny, and I didn’t lavish money on it. But it looked fantastic and I loved it.
“I guess for me, and others like me, creating a beautiful home environment has always been very important. For others, home is just a place where you sleep, not a visual extension of your personality.”
One observation about these obvious life stages and their decor counterparts is that, like the meeting of two alien species, one phase may seem completely baffling when viewed from another. How many adults really understand or accept the rebellious chaos of a teenager’s bedroom? And how many teens aspire to the more restrained decor of their parents’ living rooms?
Clare Cooper Marcus, University of California at Berkeley professor and author of “House as a Mirror of Self,” said that “an older person’s home might appear to a much younger person to be cluttered and overstuffed. And there’s actually been some research in this area that shows many older folks prefer a decorating style with furniture and objects close together for the practical reason of having something to hold onto as they move through their home. So the jumbled, cheek-by-jowl look we associated with our grandparents may have had physiological and psychological underpinnings.
“Another interesting study highlighting the difference between generations and their tastes asked what objects were most important to people, and discovered that younger generations named sports equipment, bicycles and stereos, while furniture and photographs in particular were most important to their elders. Clearly, the associations we have with acquisitions at various stages of life can change.”
But if clutter is associated with a later stage of life, then does that mean I’m nearing the Grand Finale, what with all the tchotchkes poised to be reintroduced to my living room?
“No, no,” Marcus said, “the neatness-versus-clutter question doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with one’s age, apart from that one issue of the elderly holding onto objects. There are compulsively neat people and compulsively disorderly people at every stage of lifeit’s more a personality trait. But I did meet one woman who had a definite clutter problem, and we discovered it was something she engineered after her children all left home. She cluttered the place up to make it seem as though they were still there, hanging on, as it were, to a previous phase that had ended. And the reverse is also true: A kid who has moved out of the house can get terribly upset when his or her old room is reconfigured into something else.”
Hmmm. If the transition from being childless to having children, or raising children and watching them leave home, has consequences from a design point of view, how about moving from couplehood back to singlehood? For this, I solicited the views of designer Leslie Jones, who has worked with all sorts of individuals at every stage of life here in Chicago.
“I’ve had several clients who’ve come to the project with absolutely nothingall of their possessions were lost in divorce, and they had to rent everything from sofas to dishes,” she said. “These blank slates can be interesting, because you have to discern taste quickly, without any of the normal guideposts. Generally, these folks end up with a look totally different from what they had before, as though newly establishing themselves as individuals. But I’ve also seen the trouble that can be caused in second marriages when there are furnishings belonging to a former spouse. There can be a whole lot of resentment focused on chairs or artworks or any object recalling a past relationship.”
Interestingly, both Jones and Wagner agree that one of the most creative, experimental stages of life as seen through design are the “golden years,” the decades past ages 60 and 70. “I always found it fascinating,” said Wagner, “that these people who produced children and grandchildren in nurturing but often very traditionally styled homes would suddenly create radically different environments for themselves in retirement. I mean amazing, 360-degree shifts in taste, the antithesis of what they’d lived in for decades. But the older the couple, the more secure they seem in their choices and tastes, and they often welcome the chance to have fun and innovate.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it a lot,” Jones concurs. “I think it’s because, in the middle years, the focus is more on work and family. And later on, there’s more time and more money to invest in something like a new house or decorating job, and older people are willing to go out on a limb stylistically.”
But for the majority of older people not fortunate enough to build a Xanadu or even redecorate in their twilight years, moving into a retirement or nursing home represents a phase that can be utterly traumatic, often because the surroundings are so impersonal.
“A home is full of memories, and moving into one room of an institution can be very painful,” said Cooper Marcus. “The rooms are small; choices have to be made about which precious furnishings to take or leave.
“And there’s a sense of finality about the process. It’s typical to hear folks in nursing homes talk about when they’ll be going home again. So one of the nicest things anyone can do for an elderly relative or friend is to make sure they’re surrounded by objects with strong sentimental associations.”
The homes detailed in the following pages represent just a few of the phases we pass through, or at least a few of the ways people reflect them stylistically. But no matter what stage you’re in or what is in store for the future, there is always Coco Chanel’s remark to fall back on, a reminder that no sofa, swag or square-footage ever really matters in the long run: “It’s not houses I love; it’s the life I’ve lived in them.”
