Home. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. In Adelaide, over the school holidays, we stayed at a friend's house. It was super comfortable, kid friendly and well located. I got to know its inhabitants communing with their things and as a result I grew to like them even more. Outside the regard and affection I felt for my absent hosts, who happily happen to be bookish and musical, it was not a house that spoke to me. I felt like I was having an argument with the furniture, functionality of space and objects at every turn. Which just goes to show you aesthetics is a language and the house and I did not share a common dialect. I felt this forcefully when my twin took me to visit her friend Louise. She did not say, Her Place Is Amazing. But I am pretty sure she knew I would be blown away though this phrase doesn't convey exactly the emotion, which was a quietening. I felt a happy, joyful hum of contentment, bordering on relief. It was an environment that emanated a calm confidence and reflected its owners curiosity for objects, art, geography and history. How else do you explain an English country garden, a renovation in the Japanese brutalist style with a bit of Finish modernism thrown in? In these photos everything looks like it has been put away, but on the sunny Saturday I visited and ate lunch in the kitchen, less tidy, it was less austere, more natural. I admired Louise's originality and courage in imagining such a home and bringing it steadily to life.
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