I hate buying things, not because I don’t love beauty or usefulness, but because the half-life of things is so short, and also I am cheap. I die a little inside each time a sweater rips or a glass breaks; I would rather have my teeth pulled than have to replace my phone. The planned obsolescence of electronic devices fills me with a despair so profound I occasionally dream of going away to the woods and subsisting on acorns in order to escape the cycle of entrapment.
I have some issues, as you can see. It’s partly about money, but also, maybe mostly, about the feeling that I am at the mercy of things rather than the other way around. The cheap towel bar in the upstairs bathroom broke several months ago — broke and pulled out of the wall, leaving a gaping hole. We haven’t replaced it yet because replacing it means buying a similarly cheap towel bar that will probably also break, and on and on ad infinitum. My daughter simply hangs her towel on the stub left in the wall, and we sort of try to ignore the hole.
Most people, I think, live in a similar way, although they are probably better about coming to grips with the idea that this is simply the way things are, or they are at least more proactive about fixing a broken towel bar. But there are others who have somehow managed to circumvent the common life cycle of things entirely, through some combination of skill, thrift and style.
My friend Laura Manning is one of these people. Laura is a textile designer who studied at Central Saint Martins in London. A bright, quick Brit with an air of cheery confidence and unerring fashion sense, she and her husband, Josh, own The Rise and Fall, a homewares design studio that operates out of the Brushworks building in Florence. Laura is always wearing something amazing; she may be one of the only people I know who looks effortlessly cool and completely at ease in a zippered jumpsuit. Style, a writer once noted, is what results from limitation, and Laura’s style is the result of some impressive limit setting: The last time I saw her, she mentioned that she’d gone all of 2019 without buying any new clothes, only thrifting or finding things through clothing swaps.
That kind of philosophy is endlessly intriguing to me. It seems to offer a way out of the cheap towel bar dilemma that keeps us — me, anyway — living hamstrung between spending money on things I don’t want, on the one hand, and a hole in the sheetrock on the other. Laura’s house reflects the same thrifty, make-do attitude as her clothes, with the same intensely stylish result. The day I visited her, it was cold and had been dreary and spitting rain for weeks, but when I stepped into the foyer, that dreariness was transmuted into an atmosphere of meditative calm.
Her house is old, with many quirks, but there’s nothing disjointed about it. The floor of the foyer is painted a glossy, pastille-mint-green, and this color extends up the stairs and risers and covers the banisters and newel post as well. That seamlessness is sort of a theme. Anyone who has lived in an old house before knows that “seamless” is not the adjective that comes to mind; there’s always a weird, useless alcove somewhere or a bump-out with no discernible function, where the old-timey people did God knows what. But Laura and Josh, who is a self-taught carpenter and all-around maker of things, have made those weirdnesses organic by building into them. Instead of attempting to cram a sofa or an ill-fitting table into the large angled bay window in the living room (which would be my instinct), Josh built a simple low platform for plants, which have taken full advantage of the sunny spot; Laura’s beautiful walking onion, a plant I have struggled to cultivate in a way that doesn’t call attention to its creepy bulbous qualities, has literally bloomed there.
Almost everything in their house, in fact, has been built, scavenged or found via Craigslist. There was no kitchen when they moved in; they had to construct it themselves. Josh poured the concrete around the woodstove. Even the elegant white light fixture over the bathroom sink was apparently fashioned by Josh out of some leftover components — a feat of skill and imagination that leaves a person who refuses to buy a new towel bar at Home Depot deeply impressed.
“We don’t have much,” Laura told me before I came over, and this is true — there is a great sense of openness and space throughout the long rooms. The spareness doesn’t feel barren, though. Over the stove, there’s a large framed photo of the bar in London where Josh and Laura met; in the living room, the graphic side table was a trade with their friend, Molly Hatch, an artist who also has a studio in the Brushworks building; the steel cabinet in the kitchen was a discard from the Staten Island Children’s Museum, where Josh once worked.
These objects radiate a kind of personal history that anchors the house, but there are other kinds of history layered in the mix, too. Laura’s grandfather was a shipbuilder in England during World War II, and his tools occupy a barrister’s bookcase in the dining room; the tools have Laura’s grandmother’s name etched on them. The dining table, broad planks on trestles, is made from wood reclaimed from renovations to the house itself: a different kind of cycle of things, outside the circle of buy-break-discard.
My favorite thing in the house, though, is a giant (empty) wasp’s nest that Laura found at Fitzgerald Lake in Florence. It adorns a beam in the dining room — just balanced up there, in all its glory, and for some reason, this is as inspiring to me as the handmade bed or the collection of dark, moody vases. Steve Théberge, a ceramic artist and another Brushworks colleague, had been going to throw them out before Laura rescued them.
Apart from its sheer awesomeness as an object, that little house within the house is a reminder that home is something you make out of spit and history, ingenuity, wit and stuff you find lying around. I still haven’t fixed my towel bar, but I feel newly inspired to view the hole in the wall as part of a process rather than an existential void. Patience — that’s what my daughter will have to hang her towel on for now.
Francie Lin is an editor and writer who has a complicated relationship with domestic life. She lives in Florence.