Home Furnishings

Since the bottom dropped out of the housing market, people have been coming to terms with the reinstatement of an old truth.  Houses are homes – places to live in, not places to sell.  Gone are the days of carefully decorating in neutral colours so prospective buyers wouldn’t be put off by personal taste.  Bland vases breaking up a colourless space are things of the past, belonging to an age when the property ladder still had rungs.  Home furnishings – real things, designed to make real places into living spaces – are back.

Home furnishings are anything that, to steal an old phrase, “makes a house a home”.  Home furnishings can be sofas, or beds or wardrobes.  Home furnishings can also be candlesticks, ornamental bowls, cushions:  anything that makes a space a place in which a person lives, rather than a temporary abode they inhabit until someone offers to buy.

As such, the collapse of the housing market isn’t such a catastrophe.  People are suddenly free to give rein to a long-checked desire to nest, and home furnishings are the place to start.  Who cares if those lotus flower cushions might not be to the taste of a prospective buyer?  A home might not have a potential new owner from one year’s end to the next.  Go out and buy home furnishings that really suit.  Enjoy them.  Splash out on candlesticks, throws, dining table ornaments and cutlery.  Join the joy of rediscovering what it feels like to live in a house or flat.

Home furnishings are the front line of this residential revolution.  When a home is no longer a potential show home, it doesn’t matter if the curtains don’t intrude or the vase on the bookshelf doesn’t match the table settings.  What matters is getting the home furnishings one really likes, because one really wants them, and creating a hidey hole:  a place to bring up kids in, to relax in, to grow old in.

Home furnishings make a statement about a homeowner better than kitchen plans or open-space living rooms.  Cookers, sofas, tables, are all necessary parts of a house – you can’t cook without a cooker and you can’t sit down without any chairs – so in a sense they aren’t particularly reflective of any great desire to personalise.  Home furnishings like ornaments, vases, cushions and candlesticks, though, are secondary – which means they are subject to, and evidence of, highly personalised taste.  A taste crushed by the neutral mores of the now-dead housing market.  Now is the time to get them out again.  Bring on the home furnishings – bring on the light-up globes and African statues and modern art prints and crystal bowls.  Bring on the rugs and rolls and throws.  Home furnishings are back – it’s time to start living again.