Uncluttered but not spartan, this Paris apartment belongs to designer Domitille Brion.
The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner once tweeted that she’d “pay for a service where people with good taste come to my home while I’m out and throw away everything they think is superfluous."
Mother Nature is having one of her snow-and-ice tantrums, so I’m indoors wishing someone with taste would magically apparate and start wordlessly filling garbage bags with all my junk. I want a home that looks like the one in the picture above, even though I recognize that high Haussmann ceilings, intricate mouldings and chevron chestnut floors are in short supply in Toronto’s condo offerings.
Things Aren’t People
I don’t understand people who have an easy time throwing things out. Every item I possess is a friend with its own little soul. An actual human friend, who is also in the middle of a grand clear-out, put it best: “It’s hard to remember that things aren’t people.”
To compound things, like Rosner, I’ve “internalized that throwing things away is morally bad” which led to chaos when I became the self-appointed family archivist for people long since dead. It’s hard to look at items dispassionately when you’ve lived with them since birth. They are a proxy for a house that was torn down years ago.
According to the tenets of Swedish Death Cleaning, the practise of pruning your belongings to leave less trash for your heirs to wade through, you are supposed to start around age 40. So I’m already two decades behind. That sounds about right.
Makeup brand owner Bobbi Brown, who is “self-diagnosed OCD” once told me in an interview that if you get rid of all the things you don’t like, you’ll see the things you do like more clearly. That is the only thing motivating me right now. I am almost jealous that Brown is so tightly aesthetically wound that she is physically unable to sleep if her slippers aren’t placed perfectly on the floor. I would rather have that tick instead of constantly feeling guilty, like I murdered someone, when all I did was dispose of some tea cups (although the teacups were Meissen, and I regret it enormously.)
So if anyone has any ‘decluttering’ (I hate that word) tricks, please pass them along. I have the garbage bags. I am ready to do this.