constance | Mar. 27th, 2005

Aesthetically speaking, I live a Cottage Living life. When I follow my natural inclinations, my tendency is to fill a room with battered, dark-stained, clean-lined furniture, fabrics that run more to cotton than to brocade, cheerful clutter. Ideally, any given house of mine in would not look out of place in an Ohio homestead circa 1940. I don't mean this to be my agenda, but clearly it is.

That doesn't mean, though, that I don't have a fascination for modern design, for prefab and deconstruction and minimalism. I may live a Cottage Living life, but I read Dwell too, and love it. I remember falling in love with sculptor Donald Judd's enormous, concrete-floored hangar of a house way back in high school, and Rem Koolhas and Frank Gehry and those old Memphis Studio designs make me flushed and overheated.

I say this because I don't want you to think I am unimaginative and reactionary when I say that this is just wrong. I mean. If you're going to let someone kill a cow in order to set your sofa on top of its skin, man, the least you can do is leave it looking like a fucking cow.