Redecorating? Know how you want to L.I.V.E.

For a person who has spent more than a decade writing and thinking about homes, “home” hasn’t always been a happy place for me. That, I suspect, is the case for many more of us than we would like to admit. I have moved so many times in my life, lived in so many places, that I know the essence of home life is in the people, and there, things don’t always go according to design.

- MANJU SARA RAJAN

This past year, I got divorced and my children left for boarding school. For seven years before that, I had been living in Kerala with my kids and it was, mostly, the best home life I have had. In that time, the design of my house wasn’t what had made it home, it was my children playing football in the house, thundering up and down the wooden floors, sounding like their eyeballs were on fire; it was “dance-party” evenings when one child would DJ and the other and I would dance-fly around the living room. It was the hours together in the kitchen, trying—and failing—to make Cantonese soup dumplings, it was the bedtime routine and the cuddling, the fights and make-ups. It was love. As architect Peter Zumthor writes in his book, Thinking Architecture:  “Architecture… has a special relationship with life. (It is) an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.”

So, I knew their departure would feel like butchery. I knew I would have to create a new place where I could heal, a new world for this brand-new form of myself. When I returned to my gorgeous Kerala house, everything still looked beautiful but its soul had left the body. Everything was too big, too perfect, too still. I hadn’t really created it in my reflection and for the years I spent with my children, I had never noticed or understood or even cared about how it had all come together. It took their absence for me to really think about how I wanted to live.