How to Live with Objects by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer. Clarkson Potter, 318 pp., $60.
We all, by necessity, live with objects. The world is full of them. We touch them, we look at them, we buy them, we break them, we use them to varying degrees of success. One could imagine, as companion volumes, The Idiot’s Guide to Chewing Your Food or Coexisting Successfully with Gravity. The subtitle of How to Live with Objects illuminates the authors’ loftier ambitions: “A modern guide to more meaningful interiors.” Authors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, founders of the popular interior design blog Sight Unseen, write that their book “acts as a detailed primer on how to maximize the visual and emotional impact of your interior, regardless of your space limitations, style preferences, or budget.” In other words, it’s a book of tips and tricks on how to decorate your home. What’s noteworthy—as the words meaningful and emotional suggest—is that the advice is communicated through quasi-therapeutic language, wherein they invest objects with the power to not only renovate rooms but ultimately someone’s fundamental sense of self.
Sight Unseen, founded in 2010, features home tours, interior design trends, and interviews with people in the design world. How to Live with Objects is an extension of that project, containing much of the same coverage, but framed by discussions of the authors’ design philosophy. In the introduction, they advocate a highly personal mode of design, encouraging people to follow their instincts rather than adhering to traditional rules of interior design or getting caught up in the vicissitudes of trends. They aim to liberate people from the clutches of technocratic interior designers and perfectly coherent, magazine-style homes. Once the shackles are off, they hope, people feel free to decorate based on feeling and sentimentality, and in that way improve their well-being. A telling quote: “It’s okay to think about your home not as something to be completed, but as a forever work in progress, in the same way that you yourself probably are.”
The main sections of the book—entitled “The Vintage Object and The Contemporary Object,” “The Handmade Object,” and “Styling”—impart advice on how to get inspiration and shop. Then, toward the end, there is a curious section entitled “Sentimental Object.” The authors place heavy emphasis on the role that sentiment plays when selecting objects to admit into one’s home: “We believe, and still do, that while layout and fixtures and fabrics can all play a part in making a space aesthetically pleasing, it’s the objects you surround yourself with that truly give your home its soul. … These objects are the story you tell the world about your personality and your obsessions, your experiences, and your memories, your desires, and your intentions.” In this way, objects are invested with talismanic importance, if enough of these items are thoughtfully collected—say, from Sight Unseen’s e-commerce shop—a life can be meaningfully transformed. Call it the Goop-ification of decoration, self-care consumption extended to the purchase of vases and cups. In the Goop consumption paradigm, consumption is a path to a rich life, a life made right through buying Things. We tell ourselves stories in order to buy.
Let’s try to picture the person for whom this book is meant. I imagine them, painfully cultivated to the point of neurosis, nestled within the bulbs of their Mario Bellini Camaleonda sofa, gripping this big, kelly-green book, desperately seeking salvation from the miseries endemic to being surrounded by stuff. They are constantly assailed by an unseen, sadistic other who harangues them about how their furniture and decor must all be of the same style and period while shoving copies of Architectural Digest in their face. They are tortured day and night by visions of their guests coming over for dinner, cackling to each other over how the lack of irregularity in the waves of their Ultrafragola mirror betrays it as a Formative Modern reproduction rather than the authentic model produced by Poltronova. Enter How to Live with Objects. Suddenly: deliverance! Our Design Victim is liberated to buy that funky knockoff Memphis lamp they saw at a garage sale.
Maybe interiors don’t feel “important” or “serious” enough to justify themselves, so the authors excuse their interest in them through a narrative that insists decorating one’s living space is not merely entertaining or pleasurable, but somehow brave and moral—a way to strike out against the snobs and scolds with their constricting rules, a “radical” demolition of hierarchy.
In breathy, desperate passages, Khemsurov and Singer encourage readers to trust their instincts when agonizing over which objects to purchase. “Sometimes,” they write, objects “simply bring us emotional comfort, making us feel cozy and secure in a space that feels uniquely ours—and maybe making us feel less alone.” Ultimately, Khemsurov and Singer’s entire philosophy can basically be reduced to “follow your heart” and “it’s ok to mix-and-match.” It seems that Khemsurov and Singer’s audience might need a great deal of support and validation in order to buy a toaster. Amid the constant reassurance and validation, there is precious little actual information about design or objects.
Maybe that’s because How to Live with Objects is written for people outside the world of interiors who are hungry to learn more about design but insecure about their judgment. But the best way to prepare people to move confidently in the world is to equip them with the information necessary to feel more self-assured in their own decisions. How to Live with Objects leaves readers with some helpful shopping tips—like how to do Brimfield (before sunrise, with cash) or to consider splatter painting their all-white Restoration Hardware couches—but almost no information about design or design history. In the introduction, the authors identify Terence Conran’s classic tome The House Book as their primary source of inspiration. The triumph of The House Book is that it functions as an encyclopedia of aspects of the home: there’s a section explaining how to map zoning and traffic patterns in the living room and another that differentiates between dogleg and proprietary spiral staircases. And, crucially, it’s written with style, a concept more or less foreign to the realm of contemporary interiors writing. Wit and wry humor populate the pages; the voice is erudite and cosmopolitan; the book honors design without veering into fetishism. How to Live with Objects, on the other hand, too often sounds like a bad Brené Brown impression. Nowhere does the writing capture the alleged ecstasies and thrills of a life populated by objects.
Khemsurov and Singer are undoubtedly sitting on mountains of information about design history but have chosen to fill the book with vapid, feel-good nonsense—with onology, if you will—like the following sentence: “Our objects radiate meaning into our space, triggering us to remember, feel, or think while giving our guests a tangible sense of our personality.” Maybe interiors don’t feel “important” or “serious” enough to justify themselves, so the authors excuse their interest in them through a narrative that insists that decorating one’s living space is not merely entertaining or pleasurable, but somehow brave and moral—a way to strike out against the snobs and scolds with their constricting rules, a “radical” demolition of hierarchy. How to Live with Objects implies that aesthetic activity is acceptable only insofar as it’s a form of “finding your truth.” Khemsurov and Singer go to lengths to place their book in the company of other virtuous projects—the slow food movement, for example—and insist that their design advice is inherently democratic because it can be used by anyone regardless of budget.
All of the throat clearing and paranoid attempts to situate the book somewhere entirely beyond reproach miss what should be the point of a book called How to Live with Objects. Living with objects—choosing them, admiring them, caring for them—can be wonderful as a reprieve from moral concerns. Taking objects seriously can open up vistas for the pure enjoyment of sensuous pleasures and hedonic indulgences. Objects don’t have to trigger Proustian recall or reflect your most deeply held values in order to qualify entrance to your home. They don’t, in fact, have to do anything.