The Case for One Great Object

The apartment I have lived in for the past eighteen years has good bones. It was built in the 1940s when California construction was still being done by craftsmen who understood proportion. The ceilings are high. The windows are generous. The floors are old-growth fir that I had refinished once and have since left alone to darken slowly toward amber.

What I have added over the years is largely Italian, or Italian-inspired. Not the tourist version of Italy — not terracotta and vine motifs — but the quieter Italy of workmanship and restraint. A leather club chair from Florence that took me three visits to commit to. Linen curtains in the color of unbleached cotton. Books in Italian and English stacked together on shelves I built from plans found in an old woodworking manual.

I think of a room the way I think of a meal. It should have a few things done very well rather than many things done adequately. The eye should have places to rest. The light should be considered. There should be a sense that the objects in the room were chosen, not accumulated.

Every few years Fabio visits from Virginia and we spend an evening in this room with something good to drink, talking about the years we have lived and the ones still ahead. The room holds those conversations well. That is what I most ask of a room — that it be equal to the life lived inside it.