Lataa ilmaiseksi

D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
Introduction
232
The challenge in curating a hotel, museum and gallery in one household
is that the respective practices easily clash with each other. When that
happens, the households may start to make compromises instead of working
towards perfectly curated home. Sometimes, the practices become so intertwined
that the household is not curated at all.
Mervi’s outline of her interior decoration during our second meeting made
me realise that, contrary to what the moral economy of the household literature
implies, homes cannot be seen as efficiently fulfilling a dweller’s stylistic
visions. In 2004, Mervi mentioned that she was thinking about moving out
of her rented apartment and buying her own apartment. In 2005, she was living
in the same rented two-room apartment. When I asked her about it, she
explained that it had been, professionally speaking, a hectic year and she had
not had any energy to even think about buying an apartment or renovating the
rented home so that it would be in a condition that she would find pleasing.
In effect, she was living with, for example, the same plastic wall-to-wall carpet
that she hated.
For me, this was a theoretical puzzle: how can it be made understandable
that a professional designer, one who clearly appreciated certain dwelling aesthetics,
continues to live in conditions she finds displeasing? Of course, financial
resources are one thing and, like Mervi explained, a lack of time is another,
but, from my point of view, explaining the perfectly common phenomenon
that somebody is not living the way they would like to live by stating that there
has not been enough time and money does not go deep enough into the matter.
Mervi had invested her time and money somewhere, so why not into her
home? By asking this question, I do not, of course, imply that she (or anyone
else) should invest time and money into dwelling. The point is not that the
ruptures and halts should not be there. I just wanted to understand them better.