Weird but playful: home museums. If your home was made unto a museum as it was - could you take it?

TStael

I could not.

I have teased my friends that if my home was "alien abducted" as it stands for a specimen of humanity in a museum, they should mercy kill me!

I don't believe in aliens, but it is a playful meme for mainly acceptable poor house-keeping and sacro-sanct privacy.

I actually love visiting historic residences a lot, but I sometimes wonder if I am intruding.

The state of my appartment is almost never what i would like the casual observer to see. And if I were, say, the baron Horta of Brussels, only my brother could have set that house up for all to see respecting my intimacy.

chimeric

I rent, so if my living arrangements were immured in an amber block of history, they would probably surprise and sadden later generations for being scant and meager. The place has the air of a hotel room. A hula hoop in the hallway, a door mat studiously wiped dirty, with an assortment of worn shoes and sandals like the symbols of the four seasons. In the bedroom - this laptop, an opened pack of gum, a quartz crystal without a string to hang it on, but holding it gives me a fresh feeling, like melting ice. A dozen books lie spread along the window sill and a eclipse of journals is mounted against a crimson streetlight that pulses in and out, like a star doubly unfriendly for the inscrutable intentions behind its relay, at night in the sleeper's face. In the kitchen, in cabinets that do not belong to me, there are two varieties of tea, one is running out. In the fridge, as of tonight, I have cod (I believe it is cod), milk, a very healthful beet-tomato-celery juice concoction, where I had poured some virgin olive oil to make it more so. There is also orange juice, which is so healthful I dare not touch it, and in a white drawer below a cheery, going medusa of a salad leaf. By the sink there is a little TV. I turn it on for breakfast and dinner and hear every kind of foulness and evil ingenuity parade as I cut bread.

TStael

chimeric said:

I rent, so if my living arrangements were immured in an amber block of history, they would probably surprise and sadden later generations for being scant and meager.

Who knows what crowds it could pull in another universe, eh? Thx for sharing, chimeric!

I've always rented and think the flexibility is good - unless one lives in a cost-of-living catastrophies that are modern metropols like London, Paris, NY etc.

I have to admit that my objectively "worst" flat was also my most cherised, because I was lucky enough to get a tiny studio in Paris for my Erasmus exchange. Literally, a vocabulary of five words would have been enough to describe how "furnished" my flat was, and the kitchenette and entry hall were one and the same space. Ref the cost-of-living issue in big cities, I could hardly afford it despite the modesty of my flat!! Thankfully I did. Before that I had always shared, so the sense of freedom and self just felt so good.

If you are an art fancier at all, I think that having works of art would create spots of beauty and pleasure vs the hotel thing.


I am a hypocrite in the sense that I actually really like home-museums, for the interest of the person and the period of living - yet with my possibly weird patterns of thought I also feel a bit like I am intruding.


My favorite thus far: Horta-house in Brussels, as I am a major art deco or Jugendstil architecture lover.

Least favorite: Mozart's birthhouse in Salzburg, mainly because the house had unfortunately been pretty much destroyed during the war, so it had no sense of authenticity for me.