For more than 50 years, Thomas Jefferson designed, redesigned and built and rebuilt Monticello, his mountaintop home in Virginia. His quest to make it his personal vision in architecture, decor and comfort absorbed countless hours of his time. One could say he was obsessively devoted to the pursuit despite an incredibly busy and productive career that included stints as a lawyer, congressman, governor and the nation’s secretary of state, vice president and president.
But in the end, his efforts paid off. Of Monticello Jefferson wrote, “I am as happy no where else and in no other society.”
To us, Monticello is a grand, imposing mansion-cum-museum that we ogle from a distance; to Jefferson, Monticello was a well-used home in the truest sense of the word. He designed it himself and saw to its construction. He was constantly puttering around the place throughout his lifetime, routinely changing its various aspects. By the time it was done, he had filled it with his many collections and the innovations he devised or adapted to make life easier, such as alcove beds, indoor privies, closets installed in the walls above beds, dumbwaiters, Lazy Susans and glass doors that opened and closed in tandem. All told, the place gave him comfort, improved the quality of his life and filled him with a sense of well-being.
Monticello is a prime example of the truly lived-in residence as a physical and psychic extension of the occupant, so much so that it may be difficult to separate the place from the individual. After all, a home is where we conduct every aspect of our lives. We sleep, eat, grow, love, relax and entertain there. But if one were to explain what makes a house a home, that beloved place where we feel safe and like to be, defining that bonding experience can be unwieldy, even evasive-for what turns walls into a home for one may leave another cold.
Sometimes it is the process of building the place from the ground up. Like Jefferson, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was inspired to build an idiosyncratic home with his own hands that reflected his psyche, despite a significant and busy career. He spent more than 30 years fashioning a rustic stone home in Bollingen, a town on Switzerland’s Lake Zurich, so that it emulated a castle, complete with towers, annexes, pitched roofs and a courtyard surrounded by an imposing wall. Although he had several residences, this one became his spiritual retreat and anchor, and the place that he regarded most as home. In his autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” (Vintage, 1989), he wrote that “at Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. . . . Here everything has its history; and mine.”
This passionate desire to nest is just as vital today. Witold Rybczynski, a renowned author, architect and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a best seller describing his odyssey to design and build his own house while a professor at McGill University in Montreal. In “The Most Beautiful House in the World” (Penguin, 1990), Rybczynski recounts his childhood memories, current passions and conflicting desires; discusses design and architecture ranging from the Chinese art of feng shui to the theories of Palladio, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright; and details the mundane building decisions he makes. Through these observations on matters large and small, we are privy to his thought process as he designs, revises and builds a structure that answers all his needs and is truly a home.
But making a structure your home doesn’t have to be that time-consuming, labor-intensive and cerebral. Other homeowners transform the places where they live into their homes with less fanfare or effort, yet the results still satisfy their innermost needs. Consider the paths taken by other celebrated historical figures, who have used their residences in far simpler ways to fulfill their visions and needs.
Gardens and a colorful palette were the critical elements that satisfied painter Claude Monet at his beloved Giverny home outside Paris. He rarely spoke to his friends about his painting, but he always mentioned the latest events in his vibrant gardens, according to Gerald van der Kemp, who wrote the preface to “Claude Monet: Life at Giverny” (Vendome, 1985). And he imbued the rooms and furnishings with brilliant color, including a two-toned yellow dining room, a yellow kitchen, blue salon-library, blue ceramics and an outstanding Japanese color woodcut collection.
For Pope John Paul I, all it took was a bed. Design writer Joan Kron, author of “Home-Psych” (Clarkson Potter, 1983), reveals in her book that “one of Pope John Paul I’s first acts as pontiff was to send for his own bed” from Venice, so he could feel at home in Rome. “He didn’t like sleeping in strange beds,” one of the pope’s friends told her. Unfortunately, he died unexpectedly before ever having the chance to receive the bed and make the place his home.
Furnishings and possessions, rather than architecture, also give the residences of Italian architect Gae Aulenti the personal meaning and comfort that make them home. She is internationally renowned for the design of residences, showrooms, furniture and, most recently, important art museums in Paris, Venice, Rome, Barcelona, Istanbul and San Francisco, and has two places: a little house in Milan and an apartment in Paris. She says the items that transform them all into homes are “my prototypes, objects that are gifts from friends and artworks, like a huge Lichtenstein tapestry I have in Milan.”
In a new home, Rybczynski chose to use the same tactics to make the place his own. He now resides in a circa 1906 Freestyle house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “You make a house a home by the sorts of objects you surround yourself with, which vary from person to person, and make the place familiar,” he says. In keeping with this belief, there are books everywhere, numerous paintings and eclectic furnishings.
And herein lies the crux of the issue, says Kron: “If you ask a teenager and a grandmother what makes their houses a home, you’ll get two drastically different answers. The teen will probably say my CDs, computer and posters, while the grandmother will say my china, breakfront and family albums.”
Kron, however, discounts the qualities that one might assume make a house a home, such as comfort. “Different people find comfort in different things,” she points out. Instead, she believes a place becomes a home due to “a constellation of things, starting with the ability to have your way in the space, whatever that is.” It boils down to “the freedom to personalize your space, and the ability to surround yourself with what you need and want to make a place perfect just for you.”
It is for this reason that children and especially teenagers so want to have control over the furniture, wallpaper, paint colors and objects in their rooms. They don’t care so much about trends-that white is now in and natural colors are returning. Instead, they want the room to telegraph who their favorite music stars are, what fashions they like, who their friends are.
For myriad reasons, not all of us think we have this ability and freedom to personalize the space we live in. Renters may feel limited by the dictates of their landlords; children and teens by parental controls; and spouses and significant others by the other person’s taste preferences. Many of us also are hindered by such issues as time, our inability to make a definitive decision for various reasons or our pocketbooks.
Yet most of us eventually find a way to make our residences our own. Even if we can’t find a certain highbrow antique, we come to like a close approximation, and we do so with a drive that is sometimes subconscious, and other times quite directed, passionate and overt.
“Color is one of the most common tools we use to have our way with a place,” says Leatrice Eiseman, color consultant and author of “Colors for Your Every Mood: Discover Your True Decorating Colors” (Capital). All of us have “an element of deep emotional attachment to color whether we acknowledge it or not,” she says, noting that 75 to 85 percent of us start out by opting for a colorless environment in our homes.
Eventually, color creeps into most of our places, Eiseman says, because “color deprivation sets in. We start to feel unrest, and want to freshen up the space and make it less boring. So we get over our intimidation and choose a hue to use,” she explains.
We do so in different ways. Some of us are able to acknowledge our affinities for certain hues and figure out how to use them in our homes, while for others, color choices are often subliminal and related to former associations in our lives.
In either case, “color usually serves as a trigger that evokes a certain response based on these previous experiences,” she says.
For instance, if Grandma’s kitchen was done in a charming red and white color scheme, and every time you went there you baked chocolate chip cookies, got lots of loving attention and in general had a wonderful time, “that color scheme becomes a trigger that says, ‘This is home.’ You choose it and use it because you have a deep emotional attachment to it,” Eiseman says.
Surrounding ourselves with objects, the tack taken by Aulenti and Pope John Paul I, is another common way to personalize a place. Clare Cooper Marcus, a professor emeritus of architecture at University of California at Berkeley, found this to be true in a study she conducted for her book “House as a Mirror of Self” (Conari). “A place is not a home until you’ve moved in your furniture and the movable items you carry with you from house to house,” she notes.
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While objects are indeed different for all, some universal similarities can be seen in the types of things we favor. Furthermore, cost need not be an issue, notes Eugene Halton, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He explored this topic in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, which later became the book “The Meaning of Things” (Cambridge University Press, 1981), co-authored with his adviser Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Halton says: “We go from kinetic objects as children to contemplative objects as adults. And while we devour the expected goods of a consumer culture, they are not necessarily the things we find most meaningful in our homes.”
Thus a toy truck, bicycle or dollhouse is the type of thing that becomes most important to a child, while items with emotional cachet, such as the china or silverware inherited from parents or used for decades at family meals, or family photographs, are most important to adults. These are the items that we’ve used, enjoyed and come to love. They remind us of our experiences, and were not necessarily expensive to acquire or preserve.
So regardless of age or sex or design talent, we all personalize our home in some way, whether we build it from the ground up or more simply incorporate colors, smells, objects.
Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken, a professor at McGill University, calls this “making a place homey.” In a 1989 study called “Homeyness,” he found “there are lots of ways to create a homey effect, but they embrace seven main properties.”
First is the notion that “all homey things are diminutive. Small things are charming and companionable for us, and give our world a graspable, non-threatening human scale,” he explains. Second, homey things are variable and stand out from what’s uniform or expected, such as a brick wall as opposed to one of sleek concrete. “That is why Modernism was a real departure from homeyness for many people, and those who lived in these homes would have a little homey corner” as their retreat, McCracken says.
Filling a space with things that put occupants at ease, such as objects that have meaning or odors that please, is McCracken’s third property. Making sure that those things also engage and hold our interest is the fourth.
The fifth is the mnemonic property, which means the home contains objects that reflect what its occupants have accomplished in terms of personal achievements, relationships, milestones, ritual passages and community associations.
The sixth property is authenticity, or how homey spaces are real because they reflect personal choices and are lived in rather than looked at. The seventh property is informality, which relates to the notion that a relative stranger can walk into a person’s home and the place will engage them, put them at ease and let them know something about who its owner is.
When all these criteria are met, a homey property gives the feeling of being perfectly situated in emotional, physical and temporal space, McCracken says. Simply put: It gives the feeling of well-being on every level.
Not all homes do so completely, which is why we sometimes live in homes or walk into others’ and feel an emptiness. We don’t feel the place truly captures us or someone else; it feels blank or seems to lack the soul of the person living there.
The homiest homes and the ones that we strive to create are therefore places that provide us with much more than shelter. They reflect our taste, personal yearnings and being by incorporating the features and objects we love most, no matter how unconventional, capricious, mundane or inexpensive they may be. Such places make the successful transition from structure to home because of the decisions we make as owners, regardless of changing fashions, dollars and others’ opinions of what we should live with.
Moreover, such places linger most in our memories long after we’ve moved on to other places. They remain our homes forever, because they hold captive some part of our hearts.