The Rented Self: What We Surrender When We Decorate to Belong
Walk through enough homes photographed for shelter magazines or shared on interior design accounts, and something strange happens. The rooms begin to collapse into each other. Linen sofas, the color of fog. Rattan pendant lights. Aged brass taps. A cluster of terracotta pots arranged with such deliberate artlessness that the artlessness itself becomes a style. The spaces are beautiful, often genuinely so, and they are interchangeable in a way that should trouble us more than it does. The question this sameness raises is not primarily an aesthetic one. It is a philosophical one. When we remake our homes in the image of a trend, are we expressing who we are, or are we papering over who we were in order to join something larger? And if we are joining something, what exactly are we giving up to get in? Identity Is Not What We Think It Is The word "identity" gets used loosely in conversations about decoration, as though it were a fixed object, a self we carry intact through time...
