dream home details: oxblood tufted leather sofa

Where I live now does not feel like home. I don’t know when someplace I’ve lived ever has, except perhaps as a very small child. I have never, for example, felt homesick. Each place is a necessary yet temporary storage space I work with but do not have possession of, and do not make my own. Or some combination of cannot and will not make my own.

I have an idea of home, though. Of my home, which I partially define as a place I have chosen, toward which I feel belonging, which belonging is a function of being free to mold it as my own. My environment can have a powerful effect on me, and I like the process of imagining how best to take advantage of that. It is also an extension of my style and myself, so rendering my preferences endlessly interesting and significant to me. Worth jotting down, worth devoting pinterest boards to. You know.

I have the feeling that, as with so many things, and hearing the gripes of homeowners, the imagining here might be the best part. So! Better enjoy it while I may.

In years of browsing I’ve considered many thousands of details but fear not, today I will share with you just one. It is a high priority item in my who-knows-how-distant-future: an oxblood tufted leather sofa.

I don’t imagine I would come by one cheaply, so the current vision is of an essentially bare living area, my entire furniture budget having been spent on a single item. I rather like the austere opulence of that, though. Austere opulence is a good phrase for the style I gravitate toward, home-wise.

I mean, and oxblood tufted leather sofa and hardwood floors. High ceilings. Good light. Some wine glasses. Voilà. Home.

Something like this:

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Or…this:

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I like a lot of what is going on here, actually.

Are you seeing it?

details: by the soap dish

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Hm. So…I have a bunch of vintage posable Care Bears.

I don’t really collect them in a purposeful way. Exactly. I don’t really collect anything. I just, sort of…have them. You know how you just have things? Some I’ve had since I was very small*, and some I got later because I like them, and figure if you ever want something that’s vintage, the sooner you get it, the better (ah, eBay, eBay, eBay. So many curious acquisitions can be traced back to eBay). These are such hardy little toys, the kind of thing I would want on hand if I had a baby.

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They are from 1983, like me.

I came across them in storage recently and took them out in a fit of nostalgia. I frequently rearrange my environment, and am always wondering how I can edit it, make it more fitting to the moment. So, for now, vintage Care Bears. They keep me company while I brush my teeth and whatnot. Funshine bear is encouraging me to floss.

[This is the kind of bizarre stuff you can do if you don’t have to share a bathroom.]

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And here is the soap of the moment†, the Nancy Boy Signature Body Bar. A nice, classically soapy and unobtrusive scent, all natural, and the bar is a generous size. It’s sitting on my cobbled together soap dish thing, which I really like. My personal environment is an extension of myself, re: style, and it gets the same attentions, bit by bit.

†I like bars of soap, as opposed to some substance that can be dispensed. They are more tactile, more sensual, and there is more art and history behind them.

* As it happens, I really like the wooden Nancy Boy soap dish as well. If you are into soap dishes…