The Hidden Art | Interior Decorating

Receiving Your Home with Joy

a favorite spot and painting in my home, improved with a lit candle

It seems to me that, whether it is recognized or not, there is a terrific frustration which increases in intensity and harmfulness as time goes on, when people are always daydreaming of the kind of place in which they would like to live, yet never making the place where they do live into anything artistically satisfying to them.

—Edith Shaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

What makes your home feel like ‘home’ to you? I asked the women on our live call this week. We each responded a little differently: the colors we’ve selected for the walls, the smells of lavender and family life, the views out the window, the people who live there. The joy of this book is not only to help us search out and give room to these hidden arts, but more largely to rediscover the joy and beauty of the home we’ve been given. That message comes through like a beating drum this week.

Perhaps this week’s topic on home decor is the most pertinent for the modern moment. We are privy to so many beautiful interiors through the internet. With search engines and social media, we can deep dive on the smallest things of home, like electrical plates, window treatments, or bathroom rugs. Stores and shops present us with an unlimited rolling list of things to create a home, with new options styled and released each season. While this can be helpful at times when we are searching for a specific need, I wonder how much more it stirs up a general sense of comparison and discontent in us as women, that lingering feeling of not having enough money, time, or space to create the home we desire. Here, we receive the charge of this chapter: “TODAY is our life” (77). What will we do with it to create a home right where we are, within the means of time and money given to us?