Got distracted by interiors
The aesthetic of the apartment that I share with my boyfriend Matt is friendly animals. I only realized this recently, that we had an aesthetic, and it has given me a lot of pleasure. I used to read a lot of interior design blogs, and they always featured home tours of impeccably photographed mansions. It makes me laugh to think of someone photographing our home now, of me answering questions about design inspiration, and saying, “yes our aesthetic is friendly animals.”
What makes an animal friendly? A snarling tiger is not a friendly animal. A smirking tiger, maybe. A friendly animal can be childlike, but need not be; it can also be dignified. It is probably not sophisticated. It can be anthropomorphic, but it can also not be. If it is, it is probably aware of its animal nature and winks at it. For example, an anteater becomes a friendly anteater if it feels a little conflicted about eating ants.
The first thing we bought together with the friendly animal aesthetic was a postcard with an illustration on it of a cat in a beret carrying a baguette. Cute enough, but what makes it really special is that the cat is crumbling off bits of the baguette to captivate some pigeons, with only a tinge of a murderous agenda in his eyes. We found the card at BookBook, a bookstore we used to like to go to on Bleecker Street that recently closed (it gives me a certain perverse pleasure to write that: how romantic, to have made a meaningful purchase at a West Village store that has closed; ephemeral New York).
Anyway we both quite fancied the mischievous cat with the beret and the baguette, and we brought him home and put him in a frame and hung him in our kitchen. On subsequent trips to the bookstore we picked up a few other postcards with friendly animals on them, all by the same German artist, Rudi Herzlmeier: a dachshund with a backpack climbing a mountain; a bulldog sitting morosely on a couch; two cats reading a comic book together. They spoke to us, and we put them on our walls. There were others by the artist that didn’t speak to us in the same way; we shared a conviction that the animals had to exude a certain sensibility, and luckily agreed on what that sensibility was.
The postcards were at home in our home, but we didn’t realize yet that they’d set our aesthetic. That came later. First we had to search for a chair. We wanted a chair, but we wanted the chair to be more than a chair. Our couch was grey, utilitarian. Wouldn’t it be nice if the chair had some friendly animals on it? Once that idea was in the ether, I made it my mission to find us a friendly animal chair.
I looked for a long time, for this friendly animal chair. It wasn’t easy to find. In fact, it was quite hard. Chairs are like minibreaks, if one wants to spend $2,000, then you’re fine. But if one would prefer to spend $300, then the options are limited. I finally found the one chair that was cheap enough and small enough and friendly enough. The pattern on it is called “folkland admiral” and the deer and foxes and leopards on it have the right attitude. It was the best option, the only option. (It’s poorly made and not comfortable, is the caveat there, but it’s functional as a chair.) I love it, although I rarely sit in it unless we have guests over. Mostly I like to look at it from the couch and think, yes, it is a friendly chair.
Once we had the chair, we slowly realized the chair wasn’t just a chair: it was our aesthetic in a piece of furniture. And that the aesthetic had been there all along. Before the chair and the postcards was the cow sculpture we got on holiday together. The knit lion and owl Matt brought back from Mexico. The Mexican embroidered tapestries with scenes of fishermen and farmers and friendly fish and friendly donkeys (our friend Karen made pillows from two of them for us). The seven-foot painting of a rhinoceros that Matt had purchased when he lived in New Orleans. The watercolor of two seals that my friend Edith made me. The friendly felt animal heads that Matt’s parents sent us at Christmas, a monkey and a bear. (They hang over the door to our bedroom. I put a silk scarf from India over the bear’s head—bear-bushka—and a knit bow tie on the monkey. One time I said, isn’t it a bit sad to just have their heads hanging there, and Matt said, “don’t worry, they’re holding hands inside the wall.”)
Naming the aesthetic woke an obsessive streak of consumerism in me. Now I don’t just want a lamp; I want a friendly animal lamp, and I know it must exist on the internet and I’m going to find it. We now have two: a vintage toucan and a fat little stained glass bird. Friendly animal mugs: we have three, with dogs painted on. Friendly animal storage bins, one with a rhino and and one with a crocodile. (“These are so cute for a kid’s room,” the woman at the till said.)
A friendly animal shower curtain is the most recent acquisition. I spent a week trying to find it, first in person (bust, bust, bust) then online, trying to conquer google by searching for every kind of animal I could think of (alpaca shower curtain, lemur shower curtain), any place an animal could live (jungle shower curtain, tundra shower curtain). I found the one early in my search. It’s from Anthropologie, you know, that hidden gem of retail, but the search went on long after I first saw it because it was $100, ridiculous for a piece of fabric. And yet it ended up being the right choice for our family, to spend $100 on this shower curtain. It has friendly leopards on it. They make me smile when I look at them while I brush my teeth.
For winter I want an animal rug for my bedside, but I haven’t found one friendly enough, yet. Or at the very least, knowing and dignified enough in its awareness of its own nature.
Watercolor by Matt Davis