This yellow room. Oh this yellow room. It has been sad to see it go, but a piece of me still cannot part with it. Indeed, creating a home is a long and rambling process. I think, as a way of coming back to ourselves.
Creating my home has taken its inspiration from my multicultural background, and the antique (sometimes just old) pieces dotted around Italian tiled kitchens, Swedish wooden living rooms and French stone floored hallways. Passed down from one generation to the next, the aspect of treasuring good quality furniture was instilled in my parents, and now in me, like a sense of moral ascendancy.
My childhood is a bowl of mixed emotions and home has never really felt like a permanent point in life. Maybe because family has been scattered around across many different countries. I always used to envy my friends, and still do to some degree, when they spoke about their childhood home, like something that was truly holy – where they celebrate every single Christmas, every single birthday, every single .. yeah you get it. For me, on the contrary, home never quit felt like a grounded place. Christmas was celebrated sometimes with my father, sometimes in my grandparents home in Falkenberg. Birthdays was celebrated sometimes in Prague with my aunt Ztenka or sometimes with my beautiful mother on a restaurant in Gothenburg. All those moments were all beautiful and I would not trade them for anything, not even the repetition that I envy. Because all these moments were special and wonderful, all in their own right.
So when creating my own home today is for it to be a sanctuary, for my relationship with my partner, my friends and my family. For everyone to have a common space where they can gather, for whatever little reason. But a common place, nonetheless, that belongs, not only to me, but to them as well.
So maybe creating homes, I think, is as a way of coming back to ourselves, to create our own narrative. And perhaps that’s why I’m unable to part with the yellow colour – it reminds me of something comforting, of my childhood. That colour encapsulates the memory of me running around barefoot in my aunt Maria’s Italian tiled kitchen; eating dinners around my mother’s old Czech kitchen table in our Swedish living room and my father’s armoire in the stone floored hallway.
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