On turning “No-time-for-mismatched-stuff” years old
The rub between consumerism and sustainability shows up in the smallest of spaces.
My book Find Yourself At Home is out. Every homebody in your life would like it for Mother’s Day.
If you ask me how old I am this week I would say: “No-time-for-mismatched-stuff” years old.
Yes, my 45th year seems to be the age when I decided that I can no longer live in a home with constant micro-decisions about which silverware to provide to whom and for what purpose. The era of adorably eclectic living my husband and I have cultivated since pairing up in our 20s is now over.
It was a good run.
When Adam and I got together, we practiced a type of living you might say feels like scarcity but which felt, to us, like art. Everything was mismatched and pulled from multiple sources — silverware from estate sales, vintage shops, and often, picked up off the side of the road.
No, really.
In the travels of our youth, Adam would routinely find spoons on the ground. We once came home from Paris once with four additional spoons, each a memory of some great square we visited. He cleaned them, rebent them back into workable shape, and they entered our stock.
I told myself this was what happened to the world’s lost spoons — they ended in our silver drawer.
The allure of variety: When I’m honest, the charm has been gone for years.
Meanwhile, there I am again, pushing back against change because of our desire to live lives that don’t contribute more to the landfill and twee attachment to a youthful idea of the artistic life.
I’m trying to be gentle with myself.
Needs change.
Desire is a moving target.
A home is a day-to-day evolving being.
Turning “no-time-for-mismatched-stuff” years old might be a thing to celebrate.
But as with everything in home design, there is always a rub for me. Sometimes I worry that looking at magazine spreads all day long has made me a bit ill — that I’ll never be able to look around my home without yearning for a type of fake curated domesticity where all of the pieces come together to achieve a pleasing whole. I’m going to sit with that one for a bit. can mismatched silverware be a symbol of resistence, or is a symbol of THE RESISTENCE?
But I’m also realizing that the silverware fiasco might have nothing to do with aspiration and everything to do with sanity— it’s about limiting the number of micro-decisions I have to make every single day.
Decision fatigue is often talked about in the area of workplace overload, but it applies to all categories of life — even the silverware drawer. Humans make about 35,000 decisions a day.
It’s no wonder Steve Jobs started wearing the same black turtleneck on the daily.
Now I’m thinking in full categories of uniformity:
Towels
Glassware
GF flours (don’t get me started)
Family photo albums
Wrapping paper
Cereal bowls
[insert anything we have four or more of]
The only thing I won’t ever apply a hotel-level of uniformity to is mugs. Mug choice is personal and I will die on that hill.
Where are you on the need for eclecticism/uniformity?
Rant: I read this celebrity design book by someone whose work I adore — and I hated it
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ★ I would do it differently. ★ to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.