There is a widespread notion that the home is where we let ourselves go—where the public self is hung up by the door like a coat, and what remains slumps onto the sofa in whatever condition the day has left it. This is exactly backward. The world is where we are diluted: rushed, interrupted, obliged to meet other people halfway. The home is where we are meant to concentrate. It is the one place fully within our authority, and what we do with that authority is the truest evidence of our taste, our judgment, and our seriousness about living well.
A home is not a place to shed one’s identity. It is where that identity is cultivated—through what one cooks, reads, keeps, repairs, plants, and pours; through the objects one lives among and the rituals one keeps. Everywhere else, we are partly on someone else’s terms; at home we are on our own, and a person is more truly revealed by the house he keeps than by any face he manages to hold in public.
And when we invite others in, we extend that cultivated world to them. This is what hosting is: not performance, but the sharing of one’s own manner of living with people one is glad to see—generously, and without imposing it on them. To be welcomed into a home is to be admitted to how someone actually lives. To host well is to make that admission a pleasure rather than a prescription.
At Home will concern itself with the whole of that domestic world: rooms and the objects in them, the food cooked and the cellar kept, hospitality, and the private pursuits a house exists to shelter. Dining out, being a guest elsewhere, and the wider world of restaurants belong to other sections; here we stay within our own four walls. What follows is a map of the territory these dispatches will cover.
Rooms That Belong to Someone
The worst rooms are not the ugly ones. They are the anonymous ones—perfectly tasteful, entirely impersonal: the approved sofa, the neutral rug, the large canvas chosen for expressing nothing, the three decorative books no one has opened. Everything coordinates and nothing testifies. Such rooms are often called calming. So are hotel corridors.
A room should reveal something of the person in it—not everything, and not all at once, but enough. The books should have been chosen rather than bought by the linear foot;1 the objects should have arrived over time, some inherited, some hunted down, one or two perhaps rescued from a curb and repaired well past the point of economic sense. This is not license to accumulate; a collection becomes a hoard the moment discernment quits. Nor does it require announcing every interest through decorative signage—the kitchen does not need the word EAT mounted above the table,2 since those already seated there have generally inferred the arrangement. A good room is composed but not completed: enough order to make life easier, enough looseness to let it continue. Future dispatches will take up furniture, decoration, the arrangement of rooms, and what a house says about the people in it—along with the standing preference of these pages for things honestly made, natural materials that age rather than merely wear out, and objects used rather than guarded. The good chair is for sitting in, not just ornamentation.
The Table
If civilization begins at home, it begins in earnest at the table. Not always with elaborate meals—toast and coffee may be exactly right, as may soup, or bread and cheese, or a roast chicken carried across several days. The distinction is never between grand food and modest food. It is between food given attention and food treated as refueling.
A simple dish cooked well beats an ambitious one cooked badly, and learning to make a few things properly is worth more than a hundred recipes attempted once and never repeated. Following a recipe is not a moral failure; it contains the accumulated judgment of someone who has already made the mistakes, and improvisation is often romanticized by people who do not have to eat the results.3 At Home will concern itself with dishes worth learning, techniques worth mastering, ingredients worth buying, the making of one’s own bread, and the proper balance between ambition and the fact that everyone would like to eat before ten.
The same attention extends to what is in the glass. A cellar should reflect appetite rather than aspiration: bought to be drunk, not saved for an occasion grand enough to justify it, since that occasion tends to arrive as the auction at which one’s heirs sell your wine. A bar need not be vast—a deep bench of scotches or bourbons is a fine thing to build over the years, but so is a short shelf of a few good bottles honestly chosen. What matters is that it can make the standard drinks: a whiskey, a rum, a brandy, a gin, a vodka, a few liqueurs, vermouth kept properly, bitters, citrus, decent ice, and the ability to make a handful of classics correctly before anyone sets rosemary on fire.4 Dispatches to come will take up how to stock a proper cellar, glassware, the classic cocktails, and the circumstances under which one may finally open the bottle he has nevertheless been saving. The provisional answer is sooner than you might expect.
Hospitality
Hosting is the thesis of this section made practical: the cultivated home, opened to others. A good host has prepared enough to remain among the guests rather than vanishing into the kitchen while the smoke alarm addresses the room. The food need not be lavish, but there should be enough; the drinks should appear without a scavenger hunt; the lighting should flatter and the music should not become a guest who refuses to stop talking. Ask about genuine restrictions and accommodate them quietly—without organizing the evening around making a vegetarian defend vegetarianism, or a person not drinking recount the history of the decision.
Above all, a host should not become a waiter in his own house. Hospitality is attention, not servility; guests came to see the host, not to be waited upon by him. The best evenings have structure but not always a schedule—a drink, something to eat, conversation allowed to develop, an ending reached before affection curdles into endurance—and one generous dish with a few well-chosen bottles can sometimes outperform a great deal of event planning. These pages will consider invitations, menus, houseguests who do and do not leave, and the delicate matter of whether the person who arrives with an appalling bottle should expect to see it opened.
Hobbies, Repairs, and Rituals
A home should also make room for the pursuits that produce no income and require no audience: gardening, music, the repair of some object whose market value will never repay the hours spent on it, the learning of a skill purely because one wished to have it. The justification is rarely utility; it is that the doing itself improves the day. Modern life presses every interest toward content, commerce, or identity—the hobby is made to pay for itself, the garden is photographed for strangers, the dinner becomes something to post rather than eat—and part of what a house is for is to shelter the things one does badly, privately, and for their own sake.
Some of that doing should be done with one’s own hands. There is a real difference between a household whose every repair is outsourced and one where someone knows where the water shuts off, owns a few tools, and can care for wood, patch a wall, or recognize when the honest move is to call a person who knows more. A garden teaches the same lesson at a slower pace: that care is repetitive, that attention is answered unpredictably, and that the most valuable version of a thing—a mature tree, an established vine—cannot be bought in the condition that makes it valuable, but must be waited for.
And a household keeps rituals, whether or not it means to: coffee taken the same way each morning, a particular meal on a birthday, the album that always accompanies the making of dinner, the dog who materializes the instant cheese is unwrapped. Such recurrences seem trivial, and are not; a life is largely made of them, and the only question is whether they are endured unconsciously or shaped into something that gives time a form. One of mine, for what it is worth, is the Fourth of July: Whitman read aloud whether or not anyone is listening, and a half-bottle of good bourbon—which is, I will admit, rather more bourbon than any one person should take in a single afternoon, and which I intend to go on taking all the same. Gardens, workshops, hobbies, and the customs of the household will each have their dispatches.
What “At Home” Will Cover
The home need not be grand, large, expensive, historic, or fit for publication. It should be warm; it should work; it should carry evidence of pleasure and care; it should allow both company and retreat; and it should reveal the people in it without requiring them to utter a word. At Home will range across cooking and the cellar, rooms and furniture, gardens and workshops, hospitality and the keeping of guests, repairs, rituals, and household objects—praising what is honest, useful, beautiful, generous, and built to last, and having nothing kind to say about printed wood grain, cellars assembled by score, rooms arranged entirely around a television, kitchens built for people who do not cook, or any sign that refers to wine as “mommy’s therapy.”
A home, done properly, is not where the world stops. It is where one’s own small civilization begins—and when a guest comes through the door, it should feel like entering that civilization.
Notes
- The choosing is a subject unto itself, taken up at length in How to Read. A shelf bought by the yard and a shelf built by appetite are not the same object, whatever they cost. ↩
- These pages will hear no defense of word art. Not EAT in the kitchen, not GATHER above the table, not LIVE LAUGH LOVE anywhere a functioning adult might see it. A wall that must announce the activities of the room it oversees has confessed that the room could not manage the announcement on its own. The remedy is a picture, a bare wall, or a bookshelf—anything but a sentence. ↩
- An exception must be entered for Mrs. Snoot, who improvises brilliantly and whom I would trust with any dinner. But her ease is the product of real gift and long experience, not their substitute—the improvisation the rule warns against is the kind attempted in place of understanding and competence, never the kind arrived at through them. ↩
- Note the absence, and the permanent exclusion, of flavored spirits. Watermelon vodka, peanut-butter whiskey, and their myriad siblings are not fun additions to a bar but evidence against their owner. A spirit should taste of what it is made from and of the barrel it rested in, not of an alcoholic candy made into liquid form. ↩