Beautiful things

Always in my life i have been torn between my love for simplicity and my love for beautiful things.

My mother loves beautiful things, our house is full of them. Although I have grown my own taste for them, I have always felt a bit overwhelmed by them. Why do we need all these useless expensive things? This feeling was also matched with a dismay against my mother's own profession: decorator. A decorator, I used to think when I was younger, why on earth would anyone want to devote their life in putting things in a house and choosing curtains?

And then growing up, it hit me: decorators do not make beautiful houses, they make happy people. And things are not expensive and useless, they are just small reminders of places we have been to, artists we like, unique artefacts that we have found, in short our entire lives.

The reason I am thinking of these things and I decided to write this post is because I went to a lovely house on Friday night, a house full of things of beauty and rarity. But because the people that have it are nice people, and have chosen these things because they like them and because they make them happy, the whole thing did not look contrived and pretentious, it just seemed simply great: a beautiful house, with beautiful things made by beautiful people.

It is the person then, it is the person that defines the thing, not the thing that defines the person.
Nouveau riche people have made a much bigger disservice to beauty than they think...