Hand and Home [antikvár]

foreword Decorators' houses are usually beautifully decorated. Industrial designers' interiors are almost always crisply designed. Architects' places are often impressive integrations of furniture and accessories within a dominant architectural scheme. Artists' homes can be fascinating, but they are also sometimes merely eccentric, inward, or just plain ordinary. But. a craftsman's house frequently looks like a wonderfully or oddly or surprisingly made object, as if it were one giant piece of furniture, or one vast tea set, or one grand tapestry, with a great intricacy of related parts that make up the whole. Craftsmen have a great advantage in their possessing both a perceptive eye and the skill to carry out their visions. Imagine someone weaving roomfuls of rugs, making the dinnerware, the furniture, the silver centerpieces, the iron hardware—and doing all these things beautifully. In an age that is moving beyond even the machine, we can all take pleasure in the fact that there are still people around with the skill to make wonderful objects by hand. And those of us who think we can only dream about the kinds of interiors these skilled craftsmen turn out for themselves may find it liberating to view what they have done. Much less bound by ideas of the way things are supposed to be, craftsmen make their intensely individual homes an object of creativity. Most of us assemble our homes a little like a potluck dinner: we already have this on hand, someone gave us that, we needed one of these, that thing over there was a bargain, and this item right here was irresistible. Furnishing is an exercise combining inclination, impulse, and necessity modified by the available funds. What is generally missing is an overview, an organizing principle beyond the dictates of taste or comfort. For craftsmen that principle is self-expression. Craftsmen have a knack for turning their homes into extensions of themselves. What they acquire in their furnishings and how they arrange these things speaks of their values, their interests, and their sense of themselves in the worid. This is undoubtedly what gives these interiors their distinctive personality, their feeling of being a direct reflection of the people who live in them. How do craftsmen do this? One of the ways is by filling their homes with objects that give evidence of the human mind and hand at work. When craftsmen look for things for their home, they are guided by their respect for materials and good workmanship. This also shows up in their tendency to preserve what already exists. A delightful and well-made object is always looked upon with a kinder eye. And a possession that has a past, ancestral or otherwise. seems to be especially valued. Craftsmen are not likely to spend much time shopping in the usual home-furnishings stores. Instead they haunt flea markets, junk shops, church benefits, yard sales, secondhand dealers, dusty antique shops, country auctions, and even country dumps or the discard piles on city streets. Craftsmen also do a great deal of collecting. It is a way of bringing the larger world into their homes with objects from other times and other places, objects that give a sense of the myriad cultures of the world and the wonderful things people have thought up and made. With all this amassing of the stuff of domestic life, how do craftsmen keep their homes from looking like the Museum of Improbable Finds? How do they avoid crowding and clutter? Craftsmen know how to achieve visual organization. Once craftsmen have chosen their space and start gathering what they need and want, they seem to have a remarkable knack for arranging. Did any one of them ever stand in the middle of a room, temper rising, and wonder where to put the yet-another-thing they recently acquired for a sou? Apparently not. For instance. Tommy Simpson and his wife. Missy Stevens, have ingeniously designed their house to include visual surprises everywhere, from how they line up their collections to how the chairs around the dining table form a "matched set" in which each chair is unique. Missy has some thoughts on dealing successfully with the complexity of one's surroundings: when