When we first bought our home a few years ago, I sat in the complex, unfamiliar reality of loving and hating something at the same time. We had moved for our six-month old, feeling squeezed out of our condo and suffocated by the car smog, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept this new, very suburban life. My heart swelled with gratitude as I strolled through our neighborhood under huge oaks rather than huge skyscrapers (omg fresh air), then immediately deflated with the dissatisfaction of hearing nothing but crickets chirping after 8pm (omg where is everyone). After having spent the past six years prior in LA proper, three of them in the heart of downtown where Clarence and I had lived in the most beautiful, historically renovated loft - floor to ceiling brick walls, huge windows, the whole thing - I was now finding myself trying to make this 3 bd/3ba beige-walled house feel like home.
I still vividly recall the night that we met with our new tenants to hand them the keys. The entire drive I sat in a deep melancholy, reels of our memories unraveling as I prepared myself for what would likely be the last time I would walk into our condo again. The weight of emotions around this whole move had very little to do with the loft itself, as beautiful as it was, and everything to do with the mourning of my pre-motherhood self, my former identity, the place that I felt myself come alive again having left law school to start this business. Letting go meant letting go. And back to the burbs I went.
As I found myself again post-partum, relearning who I was and prying my identity apart from my career, zip code, and self-sufficiency, making our house home was one of the most healing acts of self-care. Loving this new space to create a safe haven for Clarence, Charlotte, our pup Cody (and former pup Rem), and myself is an ongoing process: not a Pinterest perfect, interior design blog rendition, but one that takes shape and character slowly, full of intentional, tangible, and intangible things that we find meaningful. Creativity, beauty, and design is something that I see everyday, but warmth, stability, and trust is something that we work together to feel. This is home.
Our first wallpaper collection unexpectedly coincided with a season of home improvements and together they’ve reminded me again why we do what we do - to bring love and light to those who interact with our products, to create lovely daily things, with heart. To think that some (hopefully many!) of you will bring these patterns into your homes and allow them to fill your walls makes my heart sing. Our hope is that they’ll make your spaces feel truly like yours, a springboard to cultivate a full life that’s built within them; this should be the most beautiful thing we see.
With gratitude,
pat
for more on our post-partum journeys, see here and here. for more on working motherhood, see here, here, and here.
