Girl Meets Chair: Growing Up: The House of Doilies

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength

-Maya Angelou

“You must take after your mother, Nikki,” my grandmother exclaimed.

“In what way?”

“Your talent for decorating, her house is lovely!”

“What!?!?!” I replied back in disbelief. “More like, she takes after me!”

The above conversation took place over “tapa”tizers (my fancy way of saying appetizers) this Thanksgiving. My grandmother is referring to my mother’s family room.

I know, I know, let me stop you before you start lecturing. I need to tell you that I grew up in what I like to refer to as.....

THE HOUSE OF DOILIES.....queue ominous background music

Yes, it’s true. In my childhood home if there was a vase or a Precious Moments figurine you can be guaranteed that underneath each one was…….. A doily. The most unfortunate one of all being the dreaded “doily runner” that covered my mother's bedroom dresser.

I never thought anything of her obsession until I started to gain my own interest interior design that was separate from hers. Then it became a battle of taste. I would argue with her constantly about how “lame” those things were. She would come back and say…

“I like them; I don’t think that the vase looks complete without one.”

So we went back and forth for a while, me even going to the lengths of hiding all her doilies so that she could see what her house would look like without them….

She wasn’t too happy about that one.

Then one day she said something very profound. While furniture shopping for her new house, I was trying to get her to buy things that I liked instead of what she liked. After picking out a hideous orange faux-suede fabric for the chairs in her family room she looked at me and said.

“I don’t know what I like until I see it. You might not like it now, but as a whole the room will come together.”

Stoneware Birds, Prince Design UK: Dire Warning 21 print, Tag Team Tompkins: White Pendants,

ABC Home: Side Table, White on White: Wingback Chair, Pradera Rug, Doily Salad Plate, Anthropologie

My mind immediately went to my Introduction to Design class, sitting there hearing the teacher give her lecture about gestalt (the sum of all parts), it never really clicked until this moment. My mother knew what she was talking about. Not because she had amazing taste that could fill the pages of Elle Décor or Architectural Digest. It was because she knew what she liked and she made no apologies for that. As hard as I pushed her to do something else, she stayed strong in her convictions. So even though our ideas of the perfect home are vastly different, I would like to take after my mother in that way, and I'm not just talking about decorating.

Also, now that her room is finished, everything works together and it’s nothing short of a reflection of her.

This, I believe, is the key ingredient to a good design.