36 The New York Review
What the Sofa Said
Kate Bolick
Lives of Houses
edited by Kate Kennedy
and Hermione Lee.
Princeton University Press,
297 pp., $24.95
I’ve never seen it mentioned in a book
or magazine about home design, but
among the greatest contributions to
that literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s
term “will to adorn.” She coined it
in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of
Negro Expression,” to describe a habit
of embellishment she deemed central
to African- American expressiveness.
Hurston spots the trend in black ver-
nacular locutions in which one word
becomes two—“sitting- chairs,” “hot-
boiling,” “chop- axe.” Likewise, when
one decorative pocket hanging on the
wall might do, there are several. Per-
haps this “idea of ornament does not
attempt to meet conventional stan-
dards,” she writes, “but it satisfies the
soul of its creator.” To prove her point,
she describes her visit to the home of a
black woman in Mobile, Alabama:
The walls were gaily papered with
Sunday supplements of the Mobile
Register. There were seven calen-
dars and three wall pockets. One
of them was decorated with a lace
doily. The mantel- shelf was cov-
ered with a scarf of deep home-
made lace, looped up with a huge
bow of pink crêpe paper. Over the
door was a huge lithograph show-
ing the Treaty of Versailles being
signed with a Waterman fountain
pen.“The sophisticated white man or
Negro would tolerate none of these,”
Hurston notes, “even if they bore a like-
ness to the Mona Lisa. No commercial
art for decoration.” But she was there to
analyze, not cast aspersions. For Hur-
ston, appreciating the aesthetic appeal
of a butcher’s announcement and hang-
ing a doily on a wall pocket—“decorat-
ing a decoration,” as she puts it—are
instances of creative elaboration. “The
feeling back of such an act,” she writes,
“is that there can never be enough of
beauty, let alone too much.”
This is a gratifying example of find-
ing words for a form of everyday be-
havior that tends to defy articulation.
As with deciding what clothes to wear
before leaving the house or what to
eat for lunch, the choices we impose
on our living spaces are at once per-
sonal and inescapably social, a jumble
of instinct and cultural expectation so
complex that for most of us they play
out, proprioception- like, beneath the
radar of conscious thought. Until the
fairly recent rise of environmental psy-
chology and design psychology, much
of the thinking and writing about this
amorphous realm was confined to the
bourgeois sensibility of “shelter maga-
zines,” in which surfaces are served up
as aspirational images and dissected
according to principles of color, scale,
and proportion, rather than mined for
deeper meanings. If your desire for or-
nament extended to reading insightful
discussion of it, literature was the main
place to go—Edith Wharton wrote
trenchantly on this subject, as did Vir-
ginia Woolf and Henry James.
At least, that’s how it was for me. I
came across Hurston’s essay in early
2009, in the midst of the subprime mort-
gage crisis, which had felled the glossy
shelter magazine where I’d worked as
an editor. For the first time I felt more
than mere witness to history—now
both victim and participant. Though I
was neither a predatory lender nor mis-
guided buyer (I still rent my Brooklyn
apartment), I couldn’t deny that my
job had been to feed the fantasy ma-
chine. I thought often of a caption I’d
composed for a photograph of a golden
wastepaper basket that sold for $300.
Did that handful of words not play at
least a tiny part in the mass delusion?My time in the luxury slicks gave
me a surprising amount of practical
knowledge about interior design and
the decorative arts, and I remain in
awe of the great practitioners in those
fields, past and present, but I never lost
my visceral dislike of how professional-
ized taste- making twists a fundamental
human appetite for ornament into yet
another locus of anxiety. Our country’s
ongoing, cyclical battle between mini-
malism and maximalism (the “decor
wars,” as I thought of them) seemed
nothing less than a struggle over who
gets to say what, and when, and why,
masterminded by designers and, yes,
editors who wield moral rhetoric—“au-
thentic,” “artificial,” “too much”—to
shame readers out of their own inclina-
tions. Hurston’s “will to adorn” showed
me that personal decor can also be a
form of resistance, a happy refusal to
button up and follow the rules; instead
you can plant a flag on your own turf,
add a flag on top, and then add one
more for good measure.
Perhaps American consumers are
susceptible to having “good taste” in
decor imposed on them because de-
sign instincts tend to be dismissed as
inconsequential at best, and at worst
superficial. One source of blame is the
Industrial Revolution. As gender roles
calcified around the division of labor,
and “home” became a woman’s sphere,
safe from the ugliness and stench of the
streets, it also provided a new outlet
for self- expression through the buying
and arranging of products. Until the
1800s it was architects—all men—who
saw to a home’s design inside and out,proto–Frank Lloyd Wrights. But as
the nineteenth century progressed,
wealthy white society matrons sniffed a
chance to busy themselves with some-
thing other than socializing, and the
job of “decorator” was born. For the
first time, the ability to arrange attrac-
tive living spaces was commodified
and combined with “taste,” a concept
grievously infused with economic hier-
archies and racialized thinking. Edgar
Allan Poe was on the case in his 1840
essay “The Philosophy of Furniture”:A man of large purse has usually
a very little soul which he keeps in
it. The corruption of taste is a por-tion and a pendant of the dollar-
manufacture. As we grow rich our
ideas grow rusty.... But I have
seen apartments in the tenure of
Americans—men of exceedingly
moderate means yet rarae aves of
good taste.The problem, as he saw it, was that
we’d “fashioned for ourselves an aris-
tocracy of dollars” to compensate for
having “no aristocracy of blood,” and
as a result habitually mistook the ex-
pensive for the good. Among a rising
middle class, showcasing status via the
“right” sofa and throw pillows became
a national pastime, if not a secular
religion, with the Sears, Roebuck &
Co. Catalogue its bible. Where once a
woman could cluck over her neighbor
being late to church, now she could
arch an eyebrow at her choice of win-
dow treatments, even if only glimpsed
from the curb, and discuss the matter at
length with friends over tea in the pri-
vacy of her own parlor, which naturally
displayed only the “best” curtains,
china, lamps, carpets, and wallpaper.
Once the home was branded as female,
taste inseparable from filthy lucre,
and decorating a woman’s job—well,
if you weren’t a furniture magnate,
what was there about it to possibly take
seriously?The tradition of truly epiphanic,
thoughtful writing about our relation-
ship to the home seems confined to a
hard- to- reach cupboard in which spe-
cialists might root around, rather thana central aisle that most of us will re-
turn to throughout our lives.^1 Hence
my delight over the new collection
Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Ken-
nedy and Hermione Lee, which brings
together some of the best writing about
the home that I’ve ever had the plea-
sure to read—and, crucially, loads
of black- and- white photographs and
illustrations.
In her preface Lee, who has written
acclaimed biographies of Wharton,
Woolf, and others (and is a frequent
contributor to these pages), explains
that the book arose from a 2017 con-
ference hosted by the Oxford Centre
for Life- Writing, which she founded in
2010 at Wolfson College, Oxford; Ken-
nedy is its associate director. As Lee
points out, writing about one’s own
life or somebody else’s often involves
writing about houses; biographers
study them to better understand their
subjects, and memoirists and autobiog-
raphers often begin their books with a
memory of their childhood home (I can
vouch for this myself).
The twenty essays and three poems
included here adjust that relation:
rather than passing through a house
on its way to a person, each piece stays
put, inspecting the various ways a
home—or lack of one; homelessness,
vanished houses, and asylums are also
examined—shaped its inhabitant, from
ancient Rome up to the near- present.
The contributors are an eclectic mix
of archaeologists, museum curators,
historians, critics, and writers who
train their gaze on the homes of poets,
novelists, politicians, composers, col-
lectors, artists, and, in two instances,
those of their own. Less diverse are
the destinations themselves, which are
entirely Western, including Edward
Lear’s Villa Emily, in San Remo, Italy;
Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, in County Gal-
way, Ireland; and Edith Wharton’s The
Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. That
England figures disproportionally—
Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, in the
Lake District; Churchill’s Chartwell,
in Kent; and Benjamin Britten’s Red
House, in Aldeburgh, to name a few—
is easy to forgive, given the book’s ori-
gin. My selfish hope is that others will
be inspired to create similar collections
focusing on different parts of the world.
Kennedy and Lee pleasingly as-
sert the freedom to consider not only
houses, but also house- related themes.
In the opening essay, “Moving House,”
the British writer and landscape
scholar Alexandra Harris, exhausted
by her own recent move, explores what
this chore was like for those before her,
particularly during the Romantic era.
Not counting the epigraph from John
Clare (“I sit me in my corner chair/Susan Sontag’s living room, Manhattan, 1995; photograph by Dominique NabokovDominiqueNabokov(^1) A starter library might contain: The
Decoration of Houses by Ogden Cod-
man and Edith Wharton (1897); The
Domesticated Americans by Russel
Lynes (1957); The Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard (1958); An Il-
lustrated History of Interior Deco-
ration by Mario Praz (1964); Home:
A Short History of an Idea by Witold
Rybczynski (1986); At Home: A Short
History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
(2010); The Making of Home: The 500-
Year Story of How Our Houses Became
Our Homes by Judith Flanders (2014).