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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

09.04.2000

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other recent LOUNGE articles:
o The Great Roommate Search
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the Dining Chair Slipcover Debacle
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Post-Posters: Better Ideas for Dressing Bare Walls
o 10 Tips for Furniture Foraging

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DigsMagazine.com.

Style & 
S
tylishness |
  1 2 3

My friend Jeanne was the first person to ever tell me that I had style. I laughed when she said that, back in college. What she meant, I wasn’t entirely sure, except that as a result, she wanted to drag me on a shopping expedition with her. It was sweet, but I’m not sure I was much help. After all, I only know what works for me.

Style isn’t something I think about much. Maybe that sounds strange, for someone who runs a home and living magazine, but it’s the truth. I know what I like, but I rarely ponder why, and so any attempt to explain my so-called "style" always leaves me feeling a bit flustered. My home isn’t even stylish, at least not in the way I normally think of the word. It can't be easily summed up in any of those tidy little categories that interior designers so like to use to describe a space -- mid-century modern, 1930s glamour, contemporary minimalist, French provincial. Instead it’s a cozy hodge-podge of stuff I love, stuff my boyfriend loves, and stuff that we merely tolerate because we’re still waiting to stumble across the perfect, affordable replacement for said stuff. It's the loveliest home in the world -- to us. But Met Home won’t be calling me up for a photo shoot anytime soon.

Which is just fine by me. My style – if I have one at all – is about me, not about trying to live up to some magazine’s manicured vision of what a beautiful home is supposed to look like. It’s quirky, it’s mutable, it’s evolving, and just about the only thing I can say regarding it, with any amount of certainty, is that I grow slowly more confident in what constitutes my style with each picture I hang, each lamp I buy, each chair I arrange.

See, for me, style happens in bits and pieces, as I ramble on through life encountering more and more stuff I like. Yes, I am a true materialist, and I fall frequently, obsessively in love with objects, big and small. I love to shop --flea markets, thrift shops, chi-chi boutiques, Target, my parents' house -- to forage in all sorts of places for objects that catch my eye. 

but wait, there's more!

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