Displayed items

For some of us, our homes are nothing more than a place to come back to and sleep in, while for others, our homes are a place of safety and a shell from the rigours of the world around us.

Whichever way, most of us have one thing in common: the space we live in is made into ‘our own’ by some level of decoration.

If you just jumped up and thought: I am not one of those people who put some decorative item onto every available surface… good on you. I am inclined to say, however, that even you have a certain level of decoration. Think broadly: decoration is not just bits and bobs sitting on the windowsill or paintings on the wall, but can be something really small and apparently insignificant.

While comfort for some people comes from being completely surrounded by things they cherish, not all of us need an overload of things. For those of us who feel that way, comfort may come from the way our furniture is arranged or the calm that comes from an accent wall (how very 90s!). As with many other things, the way we dress our living space is a tell-tale expression of our personality. And our surroundings will likely affect the way we feel.

I urge you to take a look around your living space (or whichever room you spend most of your time in) and consider this. If your room turns out to be full of things (dare I say cluttered?) that could be a sign that your mind looks similar, while a calm room with open spaces could indicate a quiet and more restful mind. Neither of these would give any indication for intelligence, sense of style, or psychological state, of course. What it shows could be called your ‘general disposition’.

When it comes to decorations, my usual advice is to stick to less rather than more. You may find yourself wondering which of several items you will put up and then put up all of them because you cannot decide. This is a question many of us face and that has one particular solution that most of us overlook: consider the fourth dimension: time!

What happens when you put something on a wall? For a while it will be the only thing you see when you walk into the room, right? But after a couple of weeks it will just fade into the background and stand out no more. This is when you could start considering to put something else up that makes the space exceptional again.

Those are two issues that can actually be solved together! Rather than putting up all the things you like at once, hang up one of them at first and hold back on the others. When the time comes and you realise that your item does no longer register, why not exchange it for another one (that you held out on earlier)? This way, you’ll always have something that tickles your fancy, and you won’t overload your room with things that have lost their sex appeal in the first place.

Similar strategies can be used for most things we display in our homes: pictures cycling through various picture frames, window treatments that never get old, the selection of music on your phone or movies on your tablet, … there is not much that escapes this practice.

A nice side effect of this is that will be confronted with ALL the things you own regularly. This gives you a chance to reassess part of your stuff each time you make a change. You may just find that some of what you have kept really isn’t worth keeping as you have not taken it out of storage for a long time.

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

• We are collectors
• Decorate with the beautiful things you own (video)
• Discarding ballast