What's your tolerance for change?
People ask me all the time if I am constantly changing things up with the design of my home. The answer is emphatically no! Once I got everything to a place I loved (a process that admittedly took years), I haven’t wanted anything to change. My dog has a bad habit of destroying throw pillows (nightmare for a designer!) and when this happens, my impulse is to get the exact same ones. When my dining room rug wore out and the same one wasn’t available, I went looking for the closest thing.
My kids rooms have changed a lot. This is a function partly of their changing needs, but also their personalities. We moved in when they were two and four and they shared a room; now they are teenagers with very different tastes and separate spaces. They have had these rooms through changing phases from teeny toys to stuffed animals to lots of screen time, plus a learn-from-home pandemic and the spaces have adapted. Additionally, though, one of them loathes change and the other loves anything new. When we were planning to split them up (and lose our guest room) at the ages of six and eight, I did floor plans and design boards for each of them in each room, and made a big presentation so we could decide who was going where. When I was done, Clio, the elder, looked at me and said, “Eleri is moving to the guest room. I’m staying.” They could have saved me a lot of work by sharing this decision up front.
My kids in their shared room, photographed by Kim Cornelison for MSP Magazine in 2015
In hindsight of course it makes sense and I should have known. The kid who doesn’t like change didn’t change. The kid who loves anything new got a new room, which, by the way, has been painted a total of seven times.
Last weekend, my dog got into the garbage and dragged a bag of oil marinade over the new dining room rug. Oil stains badly—and worse on jute. I’m likely in the market for a new rug (again). As it happens, I recently acquired a set of Josef Hoffman 6010 chairs for a song, chairs that are a long time favorite and generally hard to find and out of reach financially. I bought them “for somewhere, someday” but all of a sudden I am trying them in my dining room and thinking differently about the rug.
In the living room, my furniture all needs reupholstery and my husband has revealed that he hates the carved Indian coffee table I got for free a decade ago, because it is uncomfortable to put your feet on.
And so, just like that, it is time for change.
As a designer, it is an opportunity to do something new. But it’s bittersweet: I loved it all, just the way it is.