Is your home rich in spirit??
Spyplane Home Goods Guide 2022: PART ONE
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It’s “home jawns” week at Blackbird Spyplane. We cover home goods all year — you can find them all, plus several cool home-goods shops, in the Home Jawns section of our Master Jawn Index. But every December we like to do a dedicated deep dive. Because if you pour all yr energy and resources into jawns while treating your home like an afterthought, you are neglecting your place of retreat from this hustle-bustle, topsy-turvy, modern world!!
As you decorate the cribbo, though, how should you proceed? The answer, if you ask us, is not to go on “minimalist autopilot,” in which case you may wind up with a house that feels “correct but cold” — the kind of place where you’re forced to ask, “Did an A*rbnb Management Company furnish this s**t or did I… ??? Where is the character…? Where is the love…?”
Put plainly: Where is the richness of spirit!?
I (Jonah) grew up in a vibrantly cluttered home, full of handsome beat-up furniture and assorted bric-a-brac my parents scored at flea markets, weird antique stores and curio shops from Paris to Perth Amboy, NJ. They hung up art they made, art I made, art their friends made, art they picked up for peanuts who knows where. In the kitchen were WFMU fridge magnets, thrifted mugs and mismatched Fishs Eddy Outlet plates. In the living room, a promotional molded-plastic bust of Joe Camel perched on a shelf, grinning down at a Fernand Léger print in a worn metal frame. Over on the windowsill was a chunk of concrete my dad salvaged from the demolition of the old West Side Highway. This was (still is!) a small fraction of the funky cacophony on site…
Erin & I don’t get anywhere near that O.D. with the décor at Spyplane HQ, as much as we admire the “1-of-1 living museum” my parents have cultivated. But we do like to tap into that spirit of vibrant clutter in controlled doses, to enliven and re-contextualize more muted pieces we’re drawn to. We hang art made by friends & family, we line a windowsill with rocks and dolphin-shaped driftwood we’ve found on shorelines, we let our bookshelves get “structural hazard”-level overcrowded. A few years ago on eBay I copped a Hans Wegner CH25 chair (a true GOAT midcentury banger, as “tasteful” as they come) — it sits draped with an old overshot-weave quilt Erin got at the Alameda Flea, near a wobbly wooden stool I inherited from my folks, who found it on a Brooklyn street corner in the ‘80s.
In a way, it’s our version of the fashion wisdom that suggests you toss a wild accessory into an otherwise understated ensemble….
… or the hummingbird nest-building wisdom that suggests you mix in pops of FUNKY VIBRANT LICHEN as you use an otherwise sober pallette.
As you navigate between the “muted” and “funky” ends of the spectrum, it’s obviously up to you to decide the ratio that feels best — but you can’t lose when you mix the two. Part Two drops Thursday. Let’s get to Part One !
— Jonah & Erin