Author’s Note: Friends, I hope you will allow me to take a slightly different turn in this month’s column. While I usually try to provide you with lots of practical tips and advice on design topics, this month I want to share with you a personal experience. It’s a little long, but I hope it will provide you some insights into who I am and from whom I derive my sense of style. Thank you for indulging me – Kaja.
When my three brothers and I were faced with dispersing of my mother’s belongings after her death in December, less would have been welcomed. Not to say that my mother was a hoarder – far from it. Everything in my mother’s house was carefully placed with a sense of visual purpose. There was no randomness to her overcrowded collections of colored Swedish glass vases, stemware, beakers and candle sticks neatly displayed in the deep niches of her sills between the storms and the mullioned window panes. All was artfully displayed and combined with thought towards color and composition. Pea green and soft oranges were favored towards the east where the morning sun would play and reflect their freshness as we ate breakfast or lunch. Purple and dark green majestically positioned in the library window niches facing west that would glow like emeralds and sapphires in the rays of the setting sun as coffee and after dinner chocolates were served. Nothing was random in my mother’s life, though the casualness of her lifestyle could fool you.
Elizabeth, my mother, was a social and generous being. She enjoyed entertaining family, colleagues, and friends who in turn looked forward to her gatherings, where food, wine and laughter flowed in equal amounts and late into the night. She was innovative with food sources and an amazing self-taught cook who took any opportunity to whip up something. She loved beautiful things around her: art, antiques and modern furniture alike but most of all, she loved people to inhabit her homes and enjoy them with her.
Her design sense or rather her collection of furniture was based on an eye for the unique. A huge American cherry dining table surrounded by Phillip Starck chairs was the focal point for countless dinners lit by a Tedesco/Rossi’s Agave ceiling lamp. My father’s baby grand used to be part of this room and many a night the dinner would evolve into someone playing the piano, usually with my father and my younger brother taking turns. The unique way she chose furniture was paired with her social habits – there was always room for one more solitary piece and one more guest.
She paired a 16th Century dark carved oak chest with Finn Juhl’s 4453 chair in bright lime green opposite an 1840 German Biedermeier Settee in Honduran Mahogany. She never re-upholstered the settee, leaving the old creamy damask silk more threadbare as years passed. She eventually defined it as Isabella colored, recounting the legend of the strong willed Portuguese queen Isabella, whose penchant for not changing her clothes during a siege laid grounds to the name.
I owe my sense of eclecticism to her. I now have to live up to everything else.
I spent a week at my mother’s house after the funeral. This was the time to organize her belongings and make heads and tails of the long lists as they accumulated. Opening drawers and cabinet doors, looking through spaces that in some ways had been hers alone was a bit intimidating. Amidst all the things I expected to come across, I found boxes and containers hidden under furniture and in drawers, each with an array of small items which had no apparent connection to each other. The boxes were random, as was their content: a plastic container held a spool with a red thread, a felt mouse, a broken paper doll, a shell. Another, an old wooden cigar box from my father’s days, housed a miniature Mexican clay house, an owl’s pellet and a flip-book among other things. A random piling of stuff that had no apparent significance and no special place of their own, like leaves left un-raked at the end of fall to be blown into a shielded corner by the wind, forgotten until spring. My brothers immediately attributed the mystery boxes to her penchant for collecting which had become more and more apparent in the large brick house she occupied as the years went on. But not so with these boxes. They were different.
You would understand my hesitation to accept this off-hand explanation if you looked through the drawers of my mother’s tall chiffoniere and her English bureau. There she kept three full sets of table decorations for Christmas; more linen napkins and table runners than could be used in a year, candle rings, serving sets. You name it, she had it times three. I discovered at least two dozen wallets and coin purses in her mahogany dresser each with their denomination of currency identified on stickers in my mother’s neat handwriting; Germany, Latvia, Sweden, Spain, USA. Places she had visited and might visit again. Not to mention the drawer with gloves for every occasion and all seasons carefully paired and lined up next to the handbags in their flannel drawstring protectors. Despite the neatness, the overabundance of stuff nonetheless represented a mountain of things which we had to make decisions about. It felt overwhelming despite the orderliness.
I could see no system to the boxes, no apparent reason for them being there, until I recognized a walnut shell with a hinge that contained a bobbing colorful ladybug. Then I knew what these boxes were. They were memory boxes. Collections of things that my mother could not throw away, because they reminded her of the children in her life as they were growing up. As I looked back into the boxes with new eyes I started to see who each of the things in the boxes represented: the ladybug in the shell was a gift from my daughter Camilla when she was 7; the chewed up gray felt mouse was our long lost cat Gaba’s favorite toy; the spool with the red string, my younger brother Jesper’s first attempt at making a fishing bob at age 5. But there was more to the assemblage than just a single reminder of each of her children and grandchildren. The boxes had the distinct feeling of being treasures and amulets. How each piece ended up in this particular box could only mean one thing. Someone else, later on, maybe a great grandchild visiting, had found all these little things around the house, played with them and created his or her own meaning around them and their inter-connections. My mother saw this, and as the insightful and thoughtful great grandmother she was, she kept the assemblage for the next time this particular child came to visit, whereupon it was pulled out, played with and put back again. Until one day the box had lost its charisma and the child became interested in something else. Then the box just stayed there, in a drawer, a cabinet or under the sofa, where it was forgotten.
Somehow I do not think my mother forgot any of the boxes or special hiding places the children found around the house. She knew the importance of those boxes at the time, and later they became important to her as a memory of a moment in time.