Thursday, April 7, 2011

Faking It (Curing Without My Book)

Alana and SCB have already thrown down the gauntlet, so I will follow along as best I can. Like Alana, I hate being forced to pick actors and actresses as representations of my style. As much as I enjoy movies and TV, I find them completely irrelevant to my life in general. So let it suffice to say I'd like my home to be Modern, Multicultural and Tidy. I am sick of the word "ethnic" as a grab-bag of cultures so I feel like Multicultural encompasses our tapestries, statues, rugs and art like I wish Modern would encompass our furniture and overall style. And good lord do I want it to be TIDY in here. I have never done the one-room cure and without a book, I am going to wing it from Alana and SCB's answers. It's not quite cheating.

Art styles that I like are Art Nouveau and Deco, ornate but not in-your-face about it. Artists I enjoy are more of a mix, including Michelangelo and Henry Moore, I like sculpture with clean lines and a little heft to it. I like Asian-style wood block prints and music posters for their firm grasp of shape and space and what I now think of as retro styling. And I love a nice botanical or otherwise vaguely academic-looking print.
This is in my office. From Aesthetic Apparatus. I love CAKE.
I look to the past for my style cues more than I look to popular culture. My current love is old WPA posters and Bauer pottery and I want to get a job so I can invest in some new decor for my new casa! Also, I find it weird to advertise for things I am not a fan of - thus I have a CAKE poster that I love but I would never have, say, a Justin Bieber poster, no matter how attractive the typography. Same with the WPA posters - I desperately want the Lassen poster because I love driving through there, I would feel weird with a Mt. Rainier poster instead as I have never been there.

Delving into my personal history doesn't tell me much. My last place we lived at for about five years and I was happy there. Painted everything and fixed it and puttered around making it my little nest. Before that I was single and rented random rooms, I usually painted or shampooed the carpets but I wasn't at any of them long enough to really make any serious conclusions about those places. Furniture was from Tarjay and disposed of via Craigslist when no longer needed, the things that stayed were art and it is all always framed and matted. No pants hangers to hang art from here!

Anyways.

What are its problems?
1. It's not coherent. It needs to be a room that can function for multiple purposes, and storage is NOT one of the main ones.
2. It is cluttered. Still.
3. I don't love the layout or the lack of light sources. It's really a one-person room right now. Antisocial, maybe.

If the house could speak, what would it say?
Pick a paint color, all those random swatches look silly in here. And get a Swiffer or something, my corners get dusty where the rug doesn't cover me.

What do I want to do more of?
Relaxing. I want to be able to read comfortably in here and do projects, not just sit at my computer.

How would I want someone to describe my home room eight weeks from now?
1. Relaxing
2. Serene
3.Comfortable (is this redundant with relaxing? maybe.)

And so it begins...

2 comments:

Alana in Canada said...

Oh, I love your Lassen Park poster. It reminds me of the Canadian Railway campaigns to bring people west. Is the room you're spiffing up the office?

I have all the steps to the one room remedy typed out in a word document--would you like me to e-mail it to you?

Anne At Large said...

I think there's a rule that all travel posters must be extra cool. The office is it, yes! And if you could email me that document it would make my posts a lot more coherent, I'm sure! Thanks so much!