Lataa ilmaiseksi

find curtains that exactly fit their study, and she did not find the ones that were
there at the time satisfactory.
R: There is one more set of curtains, which I’m not terribly excited about,
but we haven’t been able to come up with better ones either, in the
study. They are a bit, they aren’t warm enough or anything, they lack
warmth. (Rea 04 444-446)
On the other hand, although Rea had previously reduced her own collection
of furniture and things, she had then inherited other pieces from relatives and,
consequently, had lots of pieces of furniture and decorative items; it had taken
her quite a while to figure out where to place the items in the apartment’s 10+
rooms. An additional twist on the renovation work had to do with the fact that
the National Board of Antiquities and Historical Monuments was supervising
all the renovation work done in that particular block of flats, but the regulations
did not clash with their plans.
Indeed, their extensive collection of art and design made the apartment occasionally
resemble a museum or a gallery; Rea was aware of this fact, but thought
that they had avoided that look and had instead managed to build a nice home
where it is possible to live with art without being overly serious about it.
3 D E S I G N E N T E R S H O M E
135
R: this is home, this was never supposed to be a museum. Or, maybe one
day it will become a museum, but we have tried to make it possible
to live with art, that art is part of life. It should not feel alien or posh,
rather, you can have fun (Rea 04 38-41)
Hannele
Hannele, together with her husband, was living in the middle of three different
renovation projects at the time of the interviews. Their apartment had
four rooms and was part of a block of flats that had been built in 1910. They
had lived there for four years and, when we met in 2004, the couple had just
finished renovating parts of the apartment, but most of the rooms were waiting
for the forthcoming plumbing renovation that their housing co-operative was
going to take of.
In 2005, the plumbing renovation work was just being finished in their block
of flats and they were moving back from their temporary apartment. During
my 2005 visit, their interior decoration was coming together.