Cocooning
Still firmly in chrysalis-mode for the holidays
One day last week I constructed a giant lasagna, carefully loaded it into my freezer, and then realised I’d just taken my biggest roasting tray out of circulation, so was rather stymied how to proceed with roasting the Christmas veg, and took myself off to the sofa with a cup of tea and some books (an old favourite and a new one) before I tackled that challenge.
It took me a while to get the point of candles, but I’m 100% on board with them now, so I lit some candles (it was early afternoon, but lights and candles were not out of place) as well. My apartment has great charm, but also great drawbacks, including a distinct lack of insulation. It’s boiling in summer and freezing in winter. It is a challenge to regulate the temperature, and I was grateful that the weather was quite mild, but I was still sitting under a throw with a hot water bottle next to me.
My daughter said recently that she was scrolling interiors on instagram, admiring how much depth and layering rooms had, and then looked up from her screen to her own rooms and was able to admire the depth and layering in her own rooms. I have a tendency to focus on how much things are falling apart in my own apartment, but every so often I too lift my gaze from my interiors books or magazines (or interiors substacks) and am struck by how much I love my home.
Our family homes, by which I mean the ones I grew up in, as well as those belonging to my daughter, sister, niece, are characterised by being welcoming. When you come into our living rooms, you have somewhere to sit and put your feet up, and somewhere to put your drink. You have shelves of books to look at, and every wall is a gallery wall, laden with original art, prints, postcards, plates, bits of textile art. If you get cold there are throws (some hand made) to wrap around you, and cushions (also some hand made) to admire and adjust behind you.
We don’t do formal, minimalist rooms. We don’t do rooms where you hover, wondering where you sit. We don’t do rooms where you admire the meticulously arranged single knickknack, we do rooms where you fling yourself onto a bit of upholstered furniture, declare, “this is nice!” and then contentedly let your eye fall on something interesting or just beautiful or even flat out weird. We have bookshelves and walls of art that tell you anything you want to know about us. We tend to richly patterned rugs and textiles, and favour painted walls over wallpaper.
And within that of course, there is variation. My neices and nephew are in rented accommodation for now, so working within the constraints of someone else’s kitchen etc. My sister and brother in law moved into their house ten days before my oldest niece was born, and moved to Hong Kong when my youngest niece was two for a couple of years. Depending on the vagaries of the rental markets, they sometimes have offspring returning to the nest. My apartment has a small spare room that I use as a dressing room, and it also has a printing press stuck in a corner: I can’t give up the dream that I’ll start doing drypoint again. My parents bought their house in this little town well over thirty years ago, after living in rented apartments in the centre of Rome and the suburbs, and it had room for my small daughter and me. A long time later, the downstairs was turned into a flat for my daughter, and when my parents were ready to downsize, they moved into the flat and my daughter moved upstairs. The house is built into a hill, which means that both homes have an entrance and a garden, and it’s the ideal setup for intergenerational living as my grandaughter can just take herself off and go and visit her great-grandparents now that she’s old enough to navigate the stairs.
The stairs she goes up and down are marble, not because the house is grand, but because it’s in Italy. My brother-in-law has sanded all the handrails in their house in London to a velvety softness: those wooden stairs would be a luxury here but are normal in a Victorian terrace in the UK. I have both the dining table I grew up with (a long black smoked glass and chrome desk which I adore and which functions as my kitchen table) and the one that replaced it (a double pedestal leg mahogany and cherry traditional table a friend of my parents found in a junk shop decades ago), plus the one I had before (luckily has folding wings so works as a console) I inherited all of these: it’s a lot of dining tables for someone who rarely entertains! My sister’s house has some covetable pieces of furniture they brought back from Hong Kong, as well as the folding dining table that was in the house when they moved in. My parents had to do a strict edit of their furniture when they moved downstairs (hence all my tables) so they have a greatest hits which means that their core style remains intact. My daughter’s colour palette is lighter, her house more open and airy, but the core elements of family style are still here.
And by family style I mean the extended family: the hive mind has key elements of connection: shared values and beliefs, a large proportion of people working in education, a keen appreciation of art, a talent for photography that clearly passed me by, a knack for the handmade, a deep and unwavering love of Oriental carpets. My parents bought contemporary furniture when they came to Italy in the early 70s, but overwhelmingly, we resist trends: my daughter can’t leave a second-hand shop empty-handed, my niece has been known to wrestle a pavement-found upholstered armchair home on the tube, and countless items of furniture and bits and pieces travel across town and over the sea between our various homes. Along with the dining tables that used to belong to my parents, I have a couple of side-tables that belonged to my son outlaw’s mother, as she is a also source of beautiful objets and carpets.
I crochet, my niece quilts, my mother used to needlepoint, my brother-in-law’s mother sews and knits, I used to make art. Across our households, our things have a place in each others’ homes. We feel at home in each others’ homes, we admire them. They are to our taste. We impose our taste upon them, we assimilate each other’s taste.
I started this meaning just to write about how candles actually do make a room feel cosy, even when it’s a room that’s hard to heat, but I seem to have detoured into my love of my family’s homes. I am especially loving mine at the moment because it’s a wet and blustery Christmas, and it is definitely not warm in here (hurrah for cashmere joggers), but it is so delightfully warm-LOOKING, and twinkly.
India Knight writes about the importance of having a welcoming fat bed, and I am so here for that. My favourite place in the world to be is bed, and mine is always deeply inviting. I favour a cold bedroom to sleep in (very fortunate in the circumstances), but I loathe getting into a bed with cold sheets, so I have a merino wool electric blanket to warm it up before I get in. I have memories of electric blankets at my grandmother’s house, gently scalding, and then you would be tucked in so tightly with blankets over the duvet that you just fell into a motionless heat coma rather than a sleep. I resisted one of my own until I stayed somewhere that had one - not scalding at all - and now I love mine dearly. It has a timer so I put it on low before I go to bed and then it turns itself off. I also don’t think it hurts to sleep in winter with a layer of wool underneath you and a fluffy duvet on top of you. I am a big fan of feather duvets and pillows, I love them all poofed up before youget into bed, and the way they just envelop you when you actually are in. Apart from one flannel duvet cover for when its really freezing, I sleep in linen bedding summer and winter, and there’s something about the gentle crumple of a linen duvet cover and the heft of a feather duvet that is so inviting.
My bed is huge, and it is the dominating feature of the room, which doesn’t have any large pieces of furniture like a wardrobe in it (there’s nowhere to put one, because of the vagaries of an attic ceiling), and I don’t ever work from home in bed - even during lockdown I would always take myself to a table to work. Every so often, maybe once every couple of months, I’ll sleep badly: I’ll wake in the small hours and not go back to sleep. But as a rule, I sleep like a log for seven hours every night. I have a bath with mu waterproof kindle and a cup of peppermint tea, then I go to bed and keep reading, and go out like a light. I’ve been known to wake up in the morning with my face pressed to my kindle, or just toppled over from the upright position I was in before I fell asleep. I think my evening wind-down ritual helps, but I also think making sure that nothing work-related impinges on the place where I rest helps. I wish I could say that my bedroom was a tech-free sanctuary but of course it isn’t: I check my emails and messages, I write this newsletter, I read substack tucked up in bed with my morning tea and coffee. I’m more than capable of conducting Sundays from bed, just getting up for more refreshments, to cook or to do laundry.
A couple of weeks ago, I put a runner down in the hallway. It’s a wool one from IKEA that is not on the website, that I saw months ago, decided I couldn’t afford and then couldn’t stop thinking about. Even if it’s cold and wet and I forgot to set the heating to go on, just opening the door and seeing that rug lifts my spirits. The flicker of a candle, that tiny flame, gives an illusion of warmth, and I love the ritual of lighting and extinguishing a candle. For Christmas this year I asked for the Stoff Nagel candle holders: I have been stalking them for a very long time, because I think they are beautiful, and I love the idea that you can add to them over the years - and I also am very drawn to a more modern take on the traditional silver candelabra.
Right now I am writing this in bed with a cup of tea on the bedside table and a hot water bottle at my feet. I’m very focussed on feeling cosy right now, and it feels as though my apartment is designed to do that, but in the summer, my focus is on cooling everything down. I have lived in my north-facing home for almost twenty five years, and used to be a much more enthusiastic proponent of a tub of paint and a paintbrush as an antidote to boredom. Over the years, various rooms have been various colours, and various tones and shades. I used to take up the carpets and swap out the cushion covers in the summer, but I don’t do that now because that involves storage solutions I just don’t have.
I have learnt to lean into the lack of light by turning the focus of the rooms inward, and painting the walls dark. Despite the north-facing aspect, and the constant rain this last week, it is worth bearing in mind that I live in Italy, and it is sunny more often than not, and the light that doesn’t pour in is still strong. My rooms are not light-filled, but nor are you stumbling about in the dark. But the deep wall colours make everything cosy and warm in the winter, while they cool the heat down in the summer. A lot of my furniture, particularly in my bedroom, is dark wood, and tends to recede against the walls so everything I choose to highlight (my warm fluffy duvet right now, my cool linen sheets in summer) draws the eye.
I don’t own a TV - I watch whatever I am watching on my laptop, and although I sometimes think I wouldn’t mind a big screen, I do actually love the portableness of my laptop, and don’t have the space for the visual distraction of a TV. I’d much rather the focus of the living room be the sofa, and I’d much rather sit on the sofa and stare at the pictures on the walls which are pretty much the same as they were 10 years ago and never bore me, or the bookshelves. I’d rather wonder if I’ll ever create the perfect tablescape (unlikely and not from lack of trying). I’m quite happy for other people to have TVs, but I like staring at my walls.
When the word “curated” started popping up on social media in relation to interiors or fashion, it cracked me up. I had a vision of people in dust-coloured overalls and white gloves carefully and humourlessly weeding through everyone’s wardrobes and mantlepieces, turning up their noses at anything too mundane. I imagined small cupboards full of socially acceptable items, and large overflowing ones hidden round a corner full of the stuff people actually used. But the word has crept into my brain, as something to aspire to, at least a little bit. Do I just have an addiction to decorative small tins (so useful for to put small things into and immediately forget you have them)? Possibly, but every so often I go through them, decide none of them can be parted with, and arrange them prettily, and tell myself it’s fine because “I curated my collection”; rinse and repeat with anything else I have more than one of.
I had started writing this post when I read the one below from Kate Watson-Smyth, which is lovely and features people who know their stuff about making homes welcoming. I think that anyone in my family would say that once the pictures are up on the walls and the books are on the shelves, anywhere will begin to feel like home. Added on to that, its the small, quotidian things: the plate you always choose to eat off, your favourite mug, the things that are not anonymous, the stuff that you love, either because it appealed to you and you chose it, or for its associations to places you’ve been or people you love.
I am in my fat bed reading this and loving every word and picture ❤️
Beautifully put, it is a wonder how people live in rooms with no pictures on the walls and no books in sight 🫧