A Less Obvious Fall

All images via ALEXANDER JAMES | PHOTOGRAPHER

In September, when the house begins to feel different before anything in it has changed. The light reaches the dining table at a new angle. You close a window that has been open for months. By late afternoon, you want to turn on a lamp.

It is tempting to answer that feeling by decorating. Fall arrives, and suddenly there are things we are supposed to put on our porches, our mantels, our coffee tables. Some of them are lovely. But I think what we often want is harder to buy: a home that feels good to come back to when the evenings get dark.

BUT, we think...the most interesting fall rooms rarely announce the season. They only feel a little closer, a little softer, a little more themselves.

Start with the way you use the room. The chair that looked beautiful beside an open window in July might belong next to a lamp now. A bowl that spent summer holding nothing could move to the kitchen table and fill with pears. The throw at the foot of a bed might be better on the sofa, where somebody will actually reach for it. These are small changes, but they follow your life. That is why they feel convincing.

Light matters more than almost anything else. Once the sun starts leaving early, the ceiling fixture can make a room feel oddly exposed. A lamp on a low table creates a place to sit. Another in a corner gives that corner a purpose. You begin to notice what is around the light: the grain of an old cabinet, the shape of a ceramic vase, the colour in a painting you barely looked at all summer. 

Then look at what is already there. Take the good bowl out of the cupboard. Bring an old piece of pottery onto the table. Move the framed picture from the hallway to a spot where you will see it every evening. A room changes when you give its familiar things your attention again. If you want more ideas for moving things around, I wrote about the effect of fabric in Textiles: The Most Underrated Design Move in Your Home.

Of course, sometimes a room really is missing something. I love an object with enough presence to make the things around it look different. It might be a dark wooden stool beside a pale sofa, a lamp with an unusual shape, or a piece of vintage pottery that looks beautiful even when it holds nothing. That is a more satisfying purchase than a box of things you will put away in November.

There is a reason older objects work so well at this time of year. Their colours have had time to settle. Their surfaces catch light differently. They can give a room depth without asking you to change its entire palette. House & Garden’s look at decorating with vintage textiles is full of examples of how one good piece of fabric can bring warmth to a space.

Maybe that is the less obvious way into fall: pay attention to what the season makes you reach for. A place to read once dinner is done. A softer pool of light. A table worth lingering at. The pieces you have kept for years because, for reasons you cannot quite explain, you still love looking at them.

Let those things lead. The house will begin to feel like fall because you are living in it differently. That is enough.