Function and Ornamentation

Posted By Lauren

When it comes to interior design, a large part of your home’s interior is probably not designed. How much of the adornment of your home is deliberate and how much just happened over the years? When you walk through your house, how much of it do you actually see and how much fades into the background? What would it look like to a guest coming in for the first time? What would draw his or her attention in every corner? I’m sure there are things lurking back there that you never notice in your day to day life.

Growing up, my family had a mantle over the fireplace and an entire bookshelf full of decorative items. Day to day, we never looked at them, never touched them. But once in a while we would glance over and remember the oddities that we had placed on display there at some point. Many of these objects had actual uses, but we never used them, just placed them on a shelf.

There were a number of vases that never held flowers. Some were ceramic and handmade. Others were colored glass. Or if they had once held flowers, it was so long ago that they were completely dry and coated in dust. We had a number of plain glass vases that we kept in a cupboard that we actually brought out to hold flowers. For some reason, we didn’t use the pretty ones. Maybe it was out of a fear of breaking the vases. I think it was more likely that, once deemed a decoration, an object loses its utility.

On the mantle we had an short antique clock that you had to wind up and would make off key sounding chimes on the hour. When I was very small it was running all the time. Eventually, my dad only wound it when I asked him to. It’s still there now, but nobody is sure if it still works. Nevertheless, it gives that portion of the room an old-fashioned and historical air.

Then there was an oriental painted teapot. I really don’t think the teapot has ever poured tea. It just doesn’t seem that practical to use a real teapot unless you have guests to impress. You boil the water in the kettle, put the tea bag in the cup, pour the water over the tea bag, and then you’ve got tea. There’s no need for the extra step of putting the hot water in a nice pretty teapot. If you really want to make tea for more than one person, you could steep it in the kettle. There’s something delicate and elegant about a teapot. Something very sophisticated about taking that counter productive step to put the tea in a beautiful and impractical vessel. It’s a functional ornament with great implications about one’s domesticity… and my family put it on a shelf.

31 January 2007 | Interior Design | Comments

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