OBJECTS OF DESIRE

BY STEFANIE HAUGER

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How often do we hear this, occasionally followed by an awkward chuckle, because it is the easy get-out-of-jail-free, indisputable response to someone’s appreciation of something that we find utterly unappealing, perhaps even offensively ugly? (That’s where the nervous chuckle usually comes in.)

I had always struggled with this expression. I felt very awkward when I caught myself uttering it. It’s probably because deep down, I felt it was too simplistic for the complex moment of revelation and discovery that is actually occurring within a person when they find themselves in the presence of an object that they are overwhelmingly drawn to desire.

I prefer the notion that the viewer completes the narrative of an object.

We carry within us the missing pieces to finish the puzzle. One could liken this to subliminally filling in the negative spaces around the positive form or perhaps a kind of upgrading of this ‘thing’ from a mere suggestion to a full description in our hearts. The animate complete the inanimate, and vice versa. This goes far beyond merely the idea of beauty, which is a safe, somewhat dismissive blanket term for things that move us, and more into the realm of a spiritual epiphany.

Too far-fetched? Am I overthinking something that is actually really basic? Don’t we all just have different taste, and that’s all there is to it? And are our choices much more random than that?

I have witnessed hundreds of times in my career as interior architect and retailer that terribly tricky moment when two people (often coupled) stand before an object, and one is clearly falling in deep love with it while the other couldn’t see the point of it for love or money. This is always challenging as somehow these two people will have to find a way around this conundrum, and it invariably ends with one of them compromising. The divisive object either enters their shared lives forever to torture one of them by its mere presence, or it is rejected, and the other person endlessly laments its absence.

My parents always said that when a couple starts dating, one of the most important tests is to stand in front of as many shop windows as possible together. If they like the same things then they are a good match; if they don’t then there could be trouble ahead. Of course, one can be swayed by the opinion of a person one loves, but that becomes a different kind of spiritual connection to an object. This is a gesture, but not an emotion.

I have often asked myself why we are drawn to desire certain objects.

There are the distinct criteria of nostalgia, provenance, and childhood memories linked with strong subconscious emotions, experiences, travel, and the olfactory memory bank which can hit us like a freight train when we least expect it. Many objects in our homes betray a self-evident connection to us, but it is the objects, what I have always lovingly called ‘useless’, that are perhaps the most revealing and relevant; the ones that have little or no function which exist solely to make us happy and in doing so become quite essential to our existence. We need them, but mostly we don’t understand why. They are precious friends.

I have been invited on countless occasions to help clients pull their homes together, to be brutally honest about what I believe has a place within their chosen interior, and what does not. Where I saw stylistic dissonance, I tried to create harmony. Where there was clutter, I edited ruthlessly. Many a time I saw my client’s eyes moisten when I respectfully and diplomatically (in as far as this is possible) suggested that an object be removed. In retrospect, I wonder whether I was right to do this. From a purist perspective, it needed to be done. On a human level, I was asking them to disassociate with a piece of themselves.

Some homes, on the other hand, are extremely Spartan. As a highly visual person myself, I find these individuals fascinating as it is so hard to read them. There is very little within the four walls that inform me of them, unlike my own home, which is a veritable Aladdin’s cave and all my cards are thus on the table. But then I understand that my ‘object world’ is an extension of who I was, who I am, and who I want to be, and every single piece makes up a portion of my personal rhetoric. My little inanimate friends are as much my family as my daughter is (who would quite happily live without 80 per cent of them and finds them all a bit noisy. Case in point).

When I’m in someone’s beautiful home, I often find myself wondering just how connected the owners are to their objects, whether they experience a spiritual relationship with them or are the objects present because their designer told them they’ll look great.

So, for my first instalment, I ask you this: What do the objects in your home say about you? Are they relevant to you or largely meaningless? Are you keeping up with the Jones’s and denying your inner spirit, or are you celebrating yourself sufficiently?

Perhaps the wooden spoon in your kitchen drawer says more about you than you think.