Steve_Bamlett_blog

What’s your home decoration style?

Let’s get it right from the start. It is almost an oxymoron to talk about a ‘home decoration style’ for ‘style’, however you define it (let’s instance the list in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary), is a cold thing – often opposed to the notion of ‘content’, ‘matter’ or ‘substance’ and equated with abstract ideas of ‘design’ or ‘manner’ . In the context of art, we know it is a mistake to make those distinctions, for the way you say or design something is itself part of the thing represented either in version or recreation, but in styling a house we do not make it a ‘home’, the subject of so many myths of a thing to which you return, as in the nostos stories that spring from The Odyssey. I will have more to say about this when I get my ideas together about the great novel The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, which I have just finished, which uses the Turkish version of the feelings behind nostos stories called there huzun or hzun.

A chair is still a chair
Even though there's no one sitting there
[Refrain]
But a chair is not a house
And a house is not a home
When there's no one there to hold you tight
And no one there you can kiss goodnight

Ostensibly about a home being a thing, a ‘house’, with people in it, a home requires even more than people, Warwick croons – it needs people with feelings that make a house a home. We are told, variously on the populist internet – at this link most clearly, that ‘a house is not a home’ is an old phrase, North American in origin in all probability. Yet the earliest instance PhraseFinder instances is from the great nineteenth-century American feminist, and friend of Robert and Elizabeth Browning when living in Florence, Italy, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (known usually as Margaret Fuller, the last name coming from her marriage to an Italian count of that name. PhraseFinder say thar ‘it may well be that she coined it herself’. They continue: ‘Her early pro-feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published in 1845, containing this opinion:

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

That book by Fuller is a neglected and fine one that I read first at university. It does not really define a home as requiring either other people, but only one person, and the means by which a person holds together both body and mind, leaving the seat of feelings right out of it. It is a fine description of her materialism, that made her thought appeal to Mazzini as a prophet of all the People who hunger in unfair systems of governance as well as of women whose intellect needs feeding. Patriarchal society make material and intellectual provision after all much more difficult for women than men if they did not necessarily want a man (even a Count Ossoli) to provide for them.

But the prompt question can be interpreted more generously than I have done so far. After all, ‘style’ is not just a choice of how to configure pre-existing contents into decor, it can be a description of what we see however it came to be there in the decor of the home – whether planned 9or designed) or merely placed without prior conscious design – or no design at all if you do not believe in unconscious choices. I asked Co-Pilot id style was a choice or description. It returned the following from a search of online contents:

Style is both a choice and a description, depending on whether you look at it from the creator’s side or the observer’s side.

How It Is a Choice

Style is an active decision made by a creator, artist, or individual.

• Personal Expression: You choose specific clothes to project a certain image.
• Artistic Decisions: A director chooses camera angles to set a specific mood.
• Intentional Voice: A writer chooses short, punchy sentences to create urgency.

How It Is a Description

Style is a label or category used by an observer to classify what they see.

• Historical Grouping: Art historians look back and label an era “Gothic” or “Baroque.”
• Pattern Recognition: A critic describes a musician’s work as “jazz-fusion” based on the sound.
• External Identification: People describe your natural habits as your “lifestyle” or “management style.”

If anything my home can only be externally identified: with elements to which people can refuse the word ‘style’, that excluding often ‘clutter’ or anything random, or not consciously chosen to conform to the ‘look’ of the whole. Of course, the unconscious may be involved in the choice. I asked Co-Pilot if style can be unconscious. It returned the following:

Yes, style can be deeply unconscious. Much of how we dress, write, speak, or design is driven by internalized rules, emotional states, and psychological habits we rarely notice. When you pick out clothes or arrange your thoughts, your choices often reflect an automatic response to your inner world rather than a calculated choice.

• Psychological Drivers of Style
  • Internalized Rules: As noted in Inside Out Style Blog, “the invisible style rules you’ve internalised were built unconsciously.”
  • Emotional Shielding: Choosing baggy or hidden clothes often stems from sensory overload, fatigue, or stress without realizing you are using clothes as self-protection.
  • Psychological Tensions: Psychoanalysts note that choices in dress mirror archetypes and tensions between internal impulses and social presentation.
• How Unconscious Style Shows Up
  • Habitual Reaching: Automatically grabbing the same comfortable items during a difficult week.
  • Design Patterns: Artists and writers repeating motifs, pacing, or vocabulary that feel natural without tracking why.
  • Nonverbal Signaling: Communicating moods, social boundaries, or stress levels before you can articulate them in words.

Now AI uses and re-configures only content it already possesses, and some would not see anything like’though’ in these answers. But then there is often nothing like thought in many answers to answers even when asked of a human. These examples clearly pass the Turing test. My version of Geoff and myself’s ‘home’ could easily have both answers applied to them – where if there is ‘style’ it is unconsciously regulated a lot of home, in interaction, of course, with conscious motivations.

I would argue I think that you can style a house such that it looks like a home to no-one – as the yen for ‘minimalism in style always produces as a result. That’s all I have to say. If I have style it is only the wretched thing I observe with planning at a minimum – mainly if anywhere coming from husband Geoff.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxx