On the Shelf: House Thinking: A Room by Room Look at How We Live by Winifred Gallagher, 2005

For TC Style May/June 2006.

“The overarching insight that unifies our dwellings and this book alike is that home exists as much between our ears as in a building.”

I had picked House Thinking to review for this issue because I was also trying to find a new treatment for the eight-by-twelve-foot room in my apartment that serves as my study. I wanted it to be more than a place to shelve all my books and computers, and I thought I’d get some ideas from author Winifred Gallagher, especially with my newfound interest in minimalism.

Well, it’s a mixed bag. Reading this book will not get you to reinvent your living room in various shades of blue in a three-day weekend, or show you how. (I was hoping for some actual steps to help in getting the project started.) But it will try to get you to understand why you would want to do it, and how to start planning it. Gallagher may bring some ideas about how to go about furnishing or arranging a room, but House Thinking is primarily concerned with how our psychology, how our societal developments shape the rooms we live in. You can use this book for ideas on how to conjure a perfect home, if such a thing were possible, but it’s more along the lines of understanding how the homes work in relation to what you do, how you were raised and how you live your life—very much like form following function, but with more attention to the past. Gallagher gives examples from Edith Wharton, Monticello and other famous domiciles to support her take on design psychology, and such citations and quotes bog down the writing at times, but reading it left me wondering what I considered to be important, and how I could bring that into my stark, unadorned space.

Almost like learning from example, you can try to realize what you yourself treasure, you can realize what you yourself need your room’s function to be and act accordingly. For instance, if your master bedroom simply does not evoke the relaxation or intimacy needed, take the memory of your honeymoon on the Mexican coast and revive the room. This doesn’t necessarily involve an out-of-place sandbox or cumbersome aquarium, butwith light neutral or brown fabrics and bright blue glass with furnishings that encourage sprawling out or curling up. Add a warm golden fabric for the windows if there was tequila. Toss in maracas if you played them while your spouse tried to dance.

House Thinking is divided by rooms, including separate chapters for the great and living rooms and offering discussion on the garden, children’srooms, the second home, the basement and the office, which I am sad to say did not offer much specific advice to my personal situation, but the chapter was wonderfully honest in admitting that no home office could really replicate the environment of an actual workplace, simply for the psychological mindsets we enter when we sit at our desks and promptly end when we go home for the day. Gallagher also adds the tendency of electronics and telecommunications to further isolate and stretch relationships even if they are marketed to help keep people together.

Part design psychology, part history, it almost reads like a contemporary tome on wabi sabi, the Japanese tradition of finding more than just aesthetic value of furnishings and instead looking to its history and how it was made, and appreciating the imperfections that make it unique. But it’s not just about feng shui and SAD and the dozens of words blithely tossed about at open houses. Gallagher’s book is a marriage between Sigmund Freud and Martha Stewart, and a refreshing change from the modern bustle of stores such as Crate and Barrel and Ikea that cater to the recent trends of buying instead of fixing.

Buy the book, learn from it, pass it on to those friends of yours considering the mother of all remodelings. At the end I felt better about not knowing just what to do with my study, and my pocketbook shares that elation. The bookshelves don’t have to be taller or larger,the computers are just fine. It’s the lighting and lack of more than one chair.