An organized house is a pleasant house

I love organized houses and apartments. It may stem from whereever my sexuality stems (hey, I'm fulfilling a gay stereotype here) or it could stem from my need for control. Either way, I love living spaces that show thought and deliberate composition.

Interior decoration is an artform, where the decorator invokes and provokes responses through space, colors, and shapes (and smells, in some cases). It can be used in any number of ways to establish any number of feelings, from exhiliration, to kitsch, to revulsion. Granted, just living in a space and organizing furniture doesn't need to intend to trigger any kind of reaction; the tenant could just want things in a certain organization that he or she enjoys, without regard for others or what the room says about him or her. However, for many (including myself) there is value in setting up the room, coloring the room, placing the furniture, and editing over time. While I don't go so far as to adhere to any particular set of principles (such as Feng Shui), I do believe in some basic guidelines and prefer some over others.

One major guideline I believe is to continually edit a room and be willing to put stuff (pictures, glasses, vases, and more) in storage. If you have a lot of objects, then you probably use only some of them and retain the rest where it are out of habit, "just in case" you'll ever use them, or because you don't feel like packing it away. When I recently packed away several boxes of glasses from the family glass cabinet (which was overflowing with different sets, collectibles, and more), I began with glasses I could not recall had ever been used in twenty-odd years I remember living here; there was no good reason for them to take up space in the cabinet, which already had too many glasses we semi-regularly use when we host parties. I also packed away eleven boxes of books from the upper living-room, while still leaving all of the useful reference books. Just removing all of this over-abundance led to a fantastic result, with organized shelves, deliberately placed rather than bundled together knicknacks, and a glass cabinet that does not scream out with visual noise. Now the only glasses receiving attention are glasses specifically made for attention (these are glasses made by a local artist and family friend, Ingelil Mitchell).

Part of it is that, while we must allow ourselves to share our identity through our homes, we don't need to put it all out at once if we have a lot of stuff. There is a point where we go from establishing our identity to crowding out anyone else who enters; instead of being able to come in and see us, they are overwhelmed by the noise we put before them. It is by "slimming down" our array of immediately visible objects that we allow those objects to be truly seen and appreciated on their own. When they are all grouped together, they become a uniform visual mass which requires careful inspection for differentiation between the objects it contains.