Maybe We Need Some Walls
Real talk for a second.
I was brushing my teeth in Chicago on a little business jaunt last week when I started thinking about the energetic connection between open-concept spaces and the open-concept lives we've created for ourselves.
Because apparently this is what my brain does while brushing my teeth..
For a time, our homes had a lot of separate rooms and if you've followed me on social, not too long ago I shared an old floor plan I found where the layout included an actual "grooving" zone (sidebar: why tf don't we design grooving zones in our houses anymore??)
The separate rooms had separate purposes. Separate activities. And the walls lent themselves to privacy, quiet... maybe even safety.
Then the walls came down — figuratively and physically.
The era of the helicopter parent began — no judgment here, I was (am?) one 😉 — and suddenly we needed to be able to see what the kids were doing in the family room while we were standing in the kitchen.
We wanted to be connected to everyone, no matter where they were — and there were beautiful things about that: light travelled farther; families occupied the same space. The kitchen stopped being somewhere you disappeared to and became the centre of the home.
But somewhere along the way, everything also started becoming a little... same.
The light filtered across all the rooms and painted the whole house with the same brush. Monochromatic palettes. White walls. The same blond hardwood flooring running from one end of the house to the other became the standard.
One room flowed seamlessly into the next.
And weirdly, at almost exactly the same time, our lives started doing the same thing.
We started posting more of ourselves online. Our homes. Our kids. Our vacations. Our careers. Our dinners. Our bodies. Our successes.
Everything became visible.
And with all that visibility came comparison.
Some of it conscious. Probably a lot of it not.
We started making sure our houses looked like everyone else's houses and our lives looked like everyone else's lives and that, above all else, we could prove that we belonged.
Another sidebar: I swear this is somehow related to why every woman is apparently supposed to look perpetually 25 with lip filler and an immovable forehead and every teenage boy has the exact same stupid llama haircut.
Not my boys.
But you get it.
This open-concept-life herd mentality filtered into everything — our homes, our work, our families, our faces.
But... whatever happened to whimsy?
Whatever happened to the room that didn't match?
The weird wallpaper.
The chair that made absolutely no sense except that you loved it.
The formal dining room you used four times a year but felt magical every time you walked into it.
The door you could close.
The freaking grooving room.
Whatever happened to having parts of our homes — and maybe parts of ourselves — that didn't need to flow seamlessly into everything else?
This month marks five years(!) since my dad passed away.
And even writing that sentence, I'm judging myself right now as I write this:
Omg shut up about it already, Cynthia. We get it. Your dad died. You loved him. Blah blah blah.
But grief is a sneaky bitch.
And when I look back now, I can pinpoint his death as the moment I lost something I hadn't realized I'd been underappreciating..
My voice; my moxie.
Suddenly, posting anything felt trivial (or we could say "whimsical")
Because let's face it: luxury interior design isn't a world of "real" problems. We're not performing brain surgery. We're not curing cancer over here.
We're making homes beautiful.
We're creating spaces that function better.
We're bringing people joy.
And I didn't feel particularly joyful.
Sometimes I still don't.
Don't get me wrong — there is something inside of me that lights up in front of a camera (even my own phone camera). I can be myself there. And truthfully, I don't care all that much whether the person on the other side of the screen receives me with love, envy, disgust or simply scrolls past.
For a long time, that made me feel incredibly free.
And then suddenly, none of it seemed to matter anymore.
I've spent the last five years trying to find my voice again.
That's actually why this blog exists.
I love creating — even when it's messy — because I don't mind if you call me out on my bullshit.
That's how I learn.
That's how I grow.
And lately I've started wondering whether finding my voice isn't actually about going back and finding the woman I was before my dad died.
Maybe she's gone; and maybe she's supposed to be.
Maybe now it's about building some rooms again.
Not literal ones — although, as an interior designer, I'm certainly not opposed😏— but whimsical rooms inside my life where everything doesn't have to coordinate.
Where something can exist simply because I like it.
Where I can be joyful without having to justify that joy against all the terrible things happening in the world.
Where I can make something beautiful even if it only makes one person happy.
Where I can be serious in one room and ridiculous in another.
Where I can grieve my dad and still laugh my ass off five minutes later.
Where I don't have to make every part of myself flow seamlessly into the next.
Where I don't have to look like I have all my shit together at every moment.
Maybe that's what whimsy actually requires.
A little separation.
A little privacy.
A little permission to close the door on what everyone else is doing and ask yourself what you actually like.
And maybe our homes need that again, too.
What if you gave yourself permission for the powder room to be playful?
For the dining room to have a personality entirely its own.
For the wallpaper to be weird.
For the colour not to "flow."
For the thing you love to not make sense to anybody else.
For a room — or a life — to belong entirely to you.
Maybe we don't need everything to be so open.
Maybe we don't need everything to match.
Maybe we don't need everyone to see (or know) everything.
Maybe the next version of luxury isn't having one perfectly cohesive, curated (and restrained) life that looks like the one you found on Instagram.
Maybe it's allowing enough grace within its walls to be more than one thing.
And for the love of God...
Can we bring back the grooving room?
XO,
Cynthia
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