What Holds Us, part 1

The Container for the Container

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the containers we live in.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to take care of ourselves. We nourish our souls through love and friendship, meditation, creativity, spiritual practice, time in nature, meaningful work — whatever it is that makes us feel connected and purposeful and alive.

And we take care of our bodies too.

We eat good food, exercise, practice yoga, tai chi or qigong. Then you can layer in acupuncture, supplements, functional medicine, sauna, cold plunge, red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen — the list goes on and on.

I am definitely at the point in my life where I think about all of this more than I used to. I’m not 30 anymore, and I don’t take my physical body for granted in quite the same way. I want to take care of my soul, and I want to take care of this physical container carrying it around because I’d really like to be happily living in it for the next 30 years.

But Mimi and I were talking one day about the body and the soul, and another question came to me.

If the body is the container for the soul, what is the container for the container?

Our homes.

And why wouldn’t we think about them with some of the same care?

Our homes hold our bodies, but really they hold so much more than that. They hold our lives.

They hold the family dinners and the work calls and the babies and the dogs. The holidays. The mornings when you’re drinking coffee alone. The parties and the fights and the great news and the terrible news. They hold us when we sleep. They are where we come home after a really hard day.

And maybe, at their best, our homes don’t just hold our bodies.

Maybe they help nourish our souls too.

What does it feel like to be truly held?

What does it feel like to be truly seen?

I think about those questions a lot in our work.

For years, I wasn’t even sure about becoming an interior designer. Interior design really found me. And the idealistic part of me sometimes wondered: Is this materialistic? Is there really enough purpose in making things beautiful?

The answer for me now is YES.

Yes, yes, yes.

Because after doing this work for more than 25 years, I don’t really think the work is about things.

It’s about people.

I think one of my superpowers — maybe the superpower — is listening to who someone really is.

Not who they think their house is supposed to look like. Not what everyone else is doing. Not what happens to be in fashion at the moment.

Who are you?

Where have you traveled? What do you love? What makes you feel good? What do you collect? What have you inherited? How do you actually live?

Do you have twenty people over all the time or would you rather curl up in a chair with one other person?

What does Sunday morning look like?

How do you want your bedroom to feel when you walk into it?

What do you want to see first when you come through your front door?

Some of this comes through asking lots and lots of questions. And some of it, if I’m being truthful, is intuition. You spend enough time with people and you start listening for the things they aren’t exactly saying.

And that’s why when you look through our portfolio, it may look like we don’t really have a style.

Good.

We can do earthy Austin, California, a ranch, sophisticated Washington DC, a home filled with incredible French antiques mixed with modern pieces. The houses can look completely different from one another.

Because the point isn’t for a house to look like us.

It’s supposed to look — and more importantly feel — like the person who lives there.

I sometimes think of it as creating a 3D portrait of someone.

A portrait you get to live inside.