Will a tidy home tidy my mind?
On whether you can be both peaceful and creative, in the home (and in your head).
It’s spring 2019 and my husband is renovating our house, creating a bedroom in the loft because I’m due to have our third baby in the summer and we need (want?) another bedroom.
I know these two women who are breaking into interior design and they’ve kindly offered to help us design the bedroom. This feels like a relief because I’ve forgotten what interiors styles I like, or maybe I never really knew.
They walk around our house to get a feel for our taste, which feels a bit awkward because while the house itself is beautiful, interior-wise it’s all quite disjointed. It’s been pieced together over a number of years but doesn’t really feel coherent.
All the walls are white, except for in the sitting room where one is pond green and the other is a dusty pink. I painted these walls in the evenings, while my older two children slept, and left a strip of the floral wallpaper from the previous owners.
After the recce, I meet them in my kitchen and they explain that now, they understand my taste. That I am a maximalist, love lots of ornaments and will need ample shelf space in the loft to display the ornaments I will inevitably continue to collect.
I stay quiet a moment. I’m confused. I am a minimalist. I like simplicity, cleanliness, order. I like to have very little in the way of anything anywhere because that is what helps me to stay calm and sane. How could they have got this so wrong?
I glance into the sitting room with the pink and green walls, and the pink piano with artwork resting on top, rather than hung. All the books are lined up in no aesthetic order, and macrame plant hangers dangle down with no plants in them.
Yes, I suppose it looks like I like things.
But:
I feel like I’m more of a minimalist, I say, so I’d quite like a minimalist loft room.
Now, they are silent.
In my kitchen, the ‘dining table’ is a wooden trestle table I got off Ebay for £50. It’s covered in pen, paint, plaster, ink stains. We clean it but we don’t sand it. The kids call it the ‘memories table’. There are pots and cups on shelves, rather than in cupboards.
There’s a G Plan sideboard - also from Ebay, also a bargain - with records lined up next to a record player that doesn’t work. Also: speakers, plants, more ornaments. This kitchen is light and spacious and yet, it still has quite a lot of stuff in it.
They politely agree to create a minimalist design for the loft, and when they leave they probably look at each other and burst out laughing at their ridiculous client whose idea of self and home is so far from her reality.
Whatever.
The loft room is simple, plain and beautiful - bare wood and ‘pink ground’ paint and my chic French bed (that the designers tried to persuade me to get rid of and replace, but no way, because that would be so wasteful and anyway, it is the comfiest bed).
I keep everything clean and tidy. I hoover and mop the floor every week. I open the big window and the Velux windows so that fresh air can circulate. And after two blissful years in my loft room, we sell the house and move.
Now, I’m in Frome and I’m reconnecting with my love of vintage. I trawl the charity shops and pick up candle holders and floral jugs and glass vases. One week, the shops are all full of ceramic owls - apparently an owl-lover has passed. I buy several.
My house in Frome is another renovation project and once it’s white-walled and wooden-floored, I fill it with stuff. I have found lots of stuff in the boxes from when we moved. Stuff that had been hidden away, in our last house. Treasure.
Sometimes, I get annoyed about how much stuff there is but I’m also nostalgic and sentimental and I never get rid of any ornaments because they hold memories. The problem is, yesterday is now a memory so anything I buy today holds meaning.
Nearly three years later, I’m back in London in yet another new house. This one is quite small and so I know that I will be really careful not to fill it with things because that would make it feel like a little maze.
I fill it with things.
Like the teapot I’ve drawn above, which is based on an actual teapot I bought myself in December from a charity shop because even though I don’t like drinking tea made in a pot, my mum does, so I pretended it was for her, but actually: I want to display it.
It sits on the windowsill next to a drum I bought in Frome, two Tibetan singing bowls gifted to me by a lovely coaching client (a sound healer) and all the ornaments my children have added to the display (that I discreetly remove, regularly).
There is a vintage cupboard with peeling paint and rusty hooks - from Ebay - that is filled with art stuff and on top, there are piles of paper and vintage biscuit tins filled with pens, colouring pencils, rubbers, paints.
On another chest of drawers (yes: Ebay, vintage) lives an ancient typewriter. It came with our first house. The one with the floral wallpaper. It’s incredibly heavy. And I’ve decided that it made me a writer so I can never get rid of it.
You see, as well as sentimental, maximalist, minimalist and nostalgic: I’m very superstitious. So this typewriter comes to every home and always will. If ever it gets left behind, I will cease to be a writer. That’s the fear.
(Maybe I should leave it behind and see what happens. Maybe I’ll become a painter. That’s my new dream. Very new. Announced for the first time right here. I want to be a painter. Maybe the typewriter is holding me back.)
In the sitting room, the children have created an art gallery and sellotaped their pictures and paintings directly onto the wall. There are baskets of toys and gift bags with magic tricks.
Beyond, in the conservatory, that right now is more like an ice-box and so disused through the winter months, my old school desk sits in the corner with a Liberty print photo album on it. There are no photos in the album, because I don’t have time.
There are saucers piled with gemstones that I’ve collected and sticks of palo santo blackened at both ends. Pens and notebooks and photos and art work and is it all meaningful or is it just clutter? Well, I think that perhaps it can be both.
I can hold a gemstone and feel as if magical powers are coursing through my body and will shift something in my life. And I can also see that people probably think I’m a bit of a hippie when they come round (not children, they love my gemstones).
In fact: children like coming to my house. That’s what they tell me. Maybe that’s because it’s a bit like a museum where you’re allowed to touch everything and it’s not very clean and so they don’t worry about spilling drinks or paint on the floor.
But if they are coming with a parent, I do try to clean up and I get a bit stressed, because I don’t want to feel judged. I quickly hoover around and plump up the cushions and the children still wipe buttery fingers everywhere and I don’t really care.
I want to be a minimalist. I want a sparse home with space and light and nothing superfluous. I want to collect gemstones and books and artwork and vintage teapots and vases and tea-sets.
I want everything piled up everywhere and nothing piled up anywhere.
If the way our homes look and operate is indicative of how we are internally:
I am complex. Because I am wildly creative and also, sometimes, very boringly rigid and obsessed with routine. My mind thunders through life and can also be blank. I talk a lot and I forget how to talk altogether. I am colourful. Monochrome. Beige.
There is who I am (complex) and who I want to be (simple) and my home certainly reflects this. Perhaps my work does too. I want to do one thing and do it well and yet I do many many things (well or not depends on who you ask).
Our house will soon become a building site and new spaces will be created. Whether I go for a sandy simple chic design or vintage wallpaper and cluttered with ornaments is yet to be seen. I don’t know. I’ll probably try the first and end with the second.
I asked a question on Notes:
If you were to go and find a photo of you at your happiest, when/where would it have been taken?
You can see people’s replies here.
The reason I asked that question is because I’d seen photos of me with my third baby (I thought I’d lost them but rediscovered them, after some years, in a different Google Photos account) and I remembered how happy I felt back then.
He was born in the summer and we co-slept in that lovely light pink loft bedroom. I read novels on my kindle while breastfeeding him. We had time to be together, the two of us, in that peaceful space. I felt so very happy. Such simple pleasures.
Was it new motherhood? The room? The stage of life? Probably all of those things. I want peace. I like simplicity. I think I’ll aim for that in both life and the interior design of our house. (And I’ll shove all the stuff - literal; metaphorical - in cupboards.)
Annie x
Ps. I think this piece was at least in-part inspired by
’s recent posts about the story that your home tells. She has such a beautiful, creative home and I love how she writes about it and makes art based on it. I recommend you follow her.
Such beautiful story, and beautiful photo of you and third baby 🥰
Every time I read a piece of yours, I smile and nod along. I relate to the organised chaos—the battle between collecting “things” and the need of empty, naturally lit, clean space to recharge. I try to “KonMari” my space regularly, and move things around the house to keep living in it interesting (we’re currently swapping rooms, the four of us, and it’s exciting, but messy and overwhelming).
I wish I could post one of my happy-moments photo on here too! I have a photo where baby no2 is sleeping on my back, after removing the wrap that kept him there, before placing him in his bed 😍 Let me see if I can share it as a link xx
It’s lovely to meet a fellow bower bird walking through life in a human form. Layered landscapes are alive—layered interiors that reflect a life are too.