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Because my family moved so much when I was growing up — nine cities and maybe 20 residences before I left for college — I never associated the idea of home with a physical space. Rather, I thought of details, rooms, pieces of furniture, slants of light, from the many houses and apartments we’d occupied over the years: features and moments that came to stand in for a sense of rootedness.
Inside six very different family residences.
– Carl and Karin Larsson’s exuberant, art-filled houses in Sweden.
– An art dealer’s strangely familiar Venetian apartment.
– A mountain compound in Brazil where a big family found a way to live together and apart.
– Is it architecture or is it art? A Parisian couple celebrate the in-between.
– A family’s reimagined beach house in the Philippines.
– Brandon Flynn and Jordan Tannahill’s cinematic East Village apartment.
For years, I wished I’d known a home, a single residence in which decades of celebrations, fights, debates and conversations could have unfolded. Then I got older and watched as friends confronted the sale or destruction of their own family homes; they understood that they weren’t as much mourning the loss of the structure itself as what it had represented, but that knowledge didn’t make it easier. A home — the home — provides the set for all the theater of our lives; without one, we’re freer, but also unmoored.
The result, a century after the Larssons’ deaths, is a home that maintains much of their art, furniture and spirit while also graciously accommodating improvisations and additions from subsequent generations. All this is in keeping with the Larssons’ original vision; theirs would be a place free from the constraints of what they viewed as the tedium of bourgeois design of the period, with its dark brown furniture and neo-Renaissance ornamentation. Their house would be a celebration of folk art, of craft, of color and coziness. Not a house, in other words — but a home.
