Having written not so long ago that my house was in desperate need of a good clear out, it might seem ironic that I’m about to sing the praises of clutter. But there is, of course, a crucial distinction between the things that pile up on the surfaces of our homes – letters, month-old newspapers, unwanted paint samples and so on – and the things that have been placed with purpose, which give our homes soul and say something about us. I can’t really imagine my house without the latter, the good kind of clutter – bookshelves and coffee tables laden with books I’ve picked up over the years; a dresser crammed full of ceramics that have come from pottery sales and charity shops; and a windowsill of pebbles that I’ve gathered over the years.
For me, this kind of clutter is comfort – a sort of metaphorical hug. Think about the inevitable back-to-school feeling that hits as we enter September when many of us start getting our desks in order – if you’re anything like me, it is a case of digging out a notebook you might have bought while on holiday, filling a jug – perhaps an auction find – with flowers, and lighting a nice candle. Not only do I feel reassured by the presence of these things, but I am also transported to different chapters of life and to the holidays that they might have been picked up on. For clutter, above all, is memory. ‘To some degree, the things we collect are Proustian touchstones – things that recall other times and places,’ suggests designer Benedict Foley, whose own tiny cottage on the Essex-Suffolk border is laden with objects that range from pictures to porcelain. The best sort of clutter is deeply personal and can’t be replicated.
Artist and designer Luke Edward Hall, whose Cotswold cottage is a joyful mishmash of collected objects and trinkets, agrees that clutter says a lot about who we are. ‘I love being surrounded by things that we’ve collected slowly over time – some things are handmade, some things might have been given to us by friends, and some things I might have made or picked up from a junk shop on a weekend away,’ explains Luke. ‘I love how they reflect an evolution in what we like and represent moments in time,’ he adds, citing objects shaped like vegetables and majolica as a couple of their collecting obsessions from a few years ago. ‘For us, it’s not about collecting just for the sake of it, but about living with beautiful, interesting objects that speak to us.’ Luke, rather like me, admits that he can’t pass an auction house or junk shop without going inside. ‘I think it’s the thrill of the chase that I find so addictive,’ he explains. ‘It’s the idea that there might be some little, intriguing object out there waiting to be found.’
Of course, there is a point when beloved clutter can tip into chaos, when collecting can tip into hoarding. ‘You don’t want to feel like you’re drowning in stuff,’ says Luke, who admits that he and his partner, the designer Duncan Campbell, have a yearly edit when they take a table at Ruth Guilding’s Interiors Boot Sale. ‘There are some things we’d absolutely never part with, but there are others where we might feel the time has come to pass them on and that’s quite freeing,’ adds Luke. ‘Editing and rearranging is very healthy and helps give things a bit of order.’ Benedict agrees: ‘things only become clutter if you don’t value their presence – the value could be for the quality of the work or simply your amusement and enjoyment,’ he says. ‘What is important is that where you put things is considered.’ I was struck by something that homeware designer Olympia Irving said when I interviewed her for my upcoming book New English Interiors (out on October 10): ‘as soon as you start placing things with intention, it stops being clutter.’ It’s very true: so long as you put a bit of thought into the placement of objects – even if they appear incidentally placed to the outside eye – it’s highly unlikely that they will look chaotic. Benedict suggests the spacing between things is crucial: ‘without this, everything becomes a jumble – imagine a book without spacing between words or punctuation, the meaning is easily lost,’ he says. ‘At our cottage, I’ve just squeezed a lot of words into a small format book,’ he adds with a laugh.
Luke suggests that the kind of building may well dictate the amount of clutter. ‘There’s not much architecturally going on in our cottage, and so it’s all about the objects here,’ he explains. ‘But I can see that if I was living in a 16th-century building where it was all about the texture of the walls and floors that we might live with less stuff around us.’ It was something he observed on a recent holiday to Patmos, where the serene whitewashed buildings didn’t necessarily contain that many objects. ‘The few pieces that were there were very good, but it was all about moderation.’ Luke is currently in the early stages of renovating a Georgian Church hall in deepest west Penwith in Cornwall and he suggests that perhaps this might finally be a place where he lives with less stuff. ‘I thought we could keep it quite studio-ey, but I’m already buying stuff for it and I know that we’ll probably end up filling it with objects,’ he admits, with a smile.
Very often, the longer you have something in your life, the harder it is to let go of and the more it means to you. Not only does, say a painting, remind you of the happy time you bought it with your first proper pay cheque, but it might also remind you of the first flat that you lived in or a previous relationship. These pieces become loaded with memory – constants that have sat alongside you through everything. I feel this particularly with books – my shelves contain everything from academic books that take me back to my university days to a healthy collection of novels by the likes of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy that remind me of a time post university when I was trying to work out what life was all about. Even though the academic books are unlikely to get a second reading, I can’t imagine ever parting with any of them. It’s the same with ceramics, some of which I bought 15 years ago when I was going through a rather blue and white phase, which I can’t bear to part with, even though my enthusiasm for willow pattern has waned.
As design writer Deyan Sudjic notes in his brilliant 2009 book The Language of Things, ‘[o]bjects [...] are what we use to define ourselves, to signal who we are, and who we are not.’ The stuff we choose to surround ourselves with is one of the strongest portraits of who we are and there is an incredible comfort in it. It’s also a connection to the past, to memories, to happy and sad times. Long last clutter I say!
