A House Needs More Than One Era

All images by Christopher Horwood Photography

When a room comes together slowly, it is difficult to recreate deliberately because so much of its appeal comes from the absence of a clear beginning. You can't quite tell when the room was decorated, or even if it ever was.

The sofa might be relatively new. The table considerably older. There is a lamp that could only have come from the seventies, an oil painting that has been around much longer than anyone can remember, and something ceramic on the mantel whose provenance is entirely unclear.

Nothing is particularly concerned with belonging to the same moment.

And somehow, it all belongs together.

We tend to talk about these rooms as having character, which is one of those useful design words that manages to describe a feeling without explaining very much about where it comes from.

Often, we attribute it to the house itself.

Old floors. Deep mouldings. Uneven plaster. Original doors. The sorts of architectural details that make a room interesting before a single piece of furniture arrives.

There is certainly something wonderful about all of that. But I don't think architecture deserves all the credit.

Some of the most compelling rooms I've seen are relatively ordinary rooms filled with things from very different lives.

Their character has been brought in.

The chronology of a room

Most homes have always evolved this way.

Furniture stayed until it wore out. Things were inherited. A better chair replaced an old one, but the old table remained. Someone brought home a painting from a trip. A lamp moved from a parent's house into a daughter's. Something fashionable arrived and eventually stopped being fashionable, but nobody got rid of it because they still liked it.

A room quietly accumulated decades.

Modern decorating has interrupted that process somewhat.

It is now entirely possible to furnish a house in a weekend.

The convenience is extraordinary. So is the visual consistency.

The sofa, coffee table, rug, lighting, dining chairs and accessories can all belong to essentially the same design moment. Even when they come from different retailers, they have often been responding to the same references, colours, materials and trends.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things individually.

Together, though, they can make a room strangely easy to place in time.

You can look at certain interiors and know almost precisely when they were put together.

The curved boucle chair. The pale oak. The sculptural plaster lamp. The checkerboard rug. A particular shade of beige.

Every decade has its version of this.

Perhaps what makes an interior endure is allowing those moments to overlap rather than continually replacing one with another.

The usefulness of an interruption

I have become increasingly interested in objects that interrupt a room.

An old wooden table in an otherwise contemporary kitchen.

A strange 1980s lamp beside a very sensible sofa.

Chrome in a room full of warm wood.

An ornate frame where everything else is simple.

Something slightly too old, too colourful, too formal or too odd.

These pieces introduce tension, and good rooms seem to need a little tension.

Without it, the eye understands everything immediately.

A room where every piece shares the same visual language can be beautiful, but there isn't necessarily much to discover. Once you introduce something from another period, there is suddenly a conversation happening.

The contemporary object makes the old one look more interesting.

The old object makes the contemporary one look more intentional.

Neither has to carry the room alone.

Borrowing time

This is especially useful in newer houses.

A house built twenty years ago has not had a century to acquire evidence of previous lives. Its walls haven't been altered six times. Its floors haven't been worn smooth. There aren't mysterious little cupboards whose original purpose nobody remembers.

That doesn't mean we need to manufacture history.

We can simply allow older things to live there.

Vintage furniture and objects bring their own chronology with them. A lamp made in 1974 has already existed through several versions of what was considered stylish. A wooden cabinet carries marks that weren't applied at a factory to make it appear aged. An old painting has spent decades looking out at rooms that probably looked nothing like yours.

That history is subtle, but I think we register it.

It gives a room another layer of time.

And perhaps that is why a single old object can sometimes change a room more than several new ones.

Let the decades pile up

There is also something reassuring about decorating this way.

You don't have to choose an era.

You don't have to decide whether your house is mid-century or traditional or contemporary or whatever category the internet has assigned to the collection of things you happen to like.

You can like a nineteenth-century landscape and a 1970s chrome lamp.

You can put an antique table under contemporary art.

You can buy a new sofa because new sofas are comfortable and keep the slightly ridiculous side table you found secondhand because it makes the whole room better.

The common thread doesn't have to be a period.

It can simply be you.

Over time, this produces something much harder to replicate than a particular aesthetic: a home whose chronology is slightly confused.

I mean that as a compliment.

The rooms I return to again and again rarely tell me exactly when they happened.

They contain evidence of different decades, different owners, different ideas about beauty. Some things are valuable. Some aren't. Some were chosen carefully and others seem to have simply survived.

They feel less like completed interiors and more like places that are still accumulating.

Perhaps that is part of what we are actually responding to when we say a home has character.

Not age exactly.

Time.

-Juliette