Wabi-Sabi Home

domovThe home should always be a place where you can forget about the difficulties of the surrounding world. A home based on wabi-sabi should be a place where you feel absolutely free and unrestrained, to relax, to meditate, but also to create and develop your creativity.

Just like the philosophy itself, the interior according to wabi-sabi is characterized by simplicity, purity, naturality, asymmetry, and the appreciation of the flowing of time. More about wabi-sabi interior here.

Purity and simplicity, space and light. It can be said that for the wabi-sabi home, this is the most desired decoration.

For an at least partial transformation of our home into the wabi-sabi style we do not need great finance or even a designer work. A few little steps might just be enough.

However, before proceeding to the first basic step, i.e. opening space as much as possible, cleaning up, rearranging rooms, or then decorating them yourselves, take a zero step:

Magazines inundate us with images of perfect flawless interiors according to recent trends, describing how correctly and contemporarily everything should look. So often we can get to succumb to the feeling, that at home we can see things that are not exactly the way we think it would be right according to some kind of rigid perceptions of the current habitation.
Is our kitchen or bathroom too small, old, dark? Do planks on the floor have a slightly larger joint in one place? Is the plaster on the wall after the work of the electrician and even still bulging after repairs? Does the third stair after stepping on squeak a little bit? Is there a small, unclean stain on the couch that is not visible, but you know about it?

No house or apartment where someone really lives is not without any flaws.
So, step zero:
Look at your home with a slightly more tolerant attitude towards its mistakes and imperfections.

 

Do not give up on your home, but also do not look at your dwelling as a list of imperfections. Let’s simply just love our home. Even with its minor faults, behind which there’s often a story.

Step One:

As already mentioned – space, light, purity and simplicity – these are the fundamental principles of wabi-sabi interior. You probably won’t enlarge your room by any magic wand, but sometimes it’s enough to just move a piece of furniture into the corner or to think about the necessity of having some of our stuff. Cleanliness (purity) is practised not only figuratively, but literally. With the cleanliness of our home, we express our respect for our visitors, but above all that we respect ourselves. By keeping surfaces free of dust and dirt we deliver to our space the desired feeling of peace and order.

So, therefore, the first and indispensable step in creating a wabi-sabi style space is cleaning or getting rid of the disorder and things that have gradually accumulated. It sounds simple, but maybe you also have a problem with throwing out all those small or big gifts from your loved ones, a collection of travel souvenirs, a family heirloom. Maybe you would even like to throw some of them away, but for another member of your family, they are valuables, that he/she would not want to lose. And even though you have restrictions, what to do when you want to relieve your home?

Try the old Japanese method of ROTATING PRECIOUS ITEMS. Japanese hid their valuables and were displayed just a few of them in a specially designated area or in a special niche – tokonoma. After a certain time, they realigned them. Assuming we have storage space, we just hide these little things and our valuable belongings and display only a few of them at a time. After some time, we replace them with another from our “warehouse”. This method is far less painful than just getting rid of our “valuables.” Moreover, after some time when we do not have them all the time in our eyes, they will seemingly come off as even rarer or on the contrary, suitable for throwing out or handing over.

Wabi-sabi home does not have to look like a monastic dwelling without any ornaments or few fancy items. But also it should not be overcrowded with external details.

But we’re already at the next step:

Step Two: Interior Equipment

The wabi-sabi style is not suitable for supporters of consumerism. On the contrary, it is inclining towards a sustainable environmental approach. Things and equipment made of quality natural materials and in good quality design are not hurt by time or a gentle usage. Getting a patina of time often rather benefits them. And we do not change such things so often.

As mentioned in the Wabi-Sabi Interior post,  with the wabi-sabi interior, they are related:

  • colours –  rather subtle and matte;
  • materials – as natural as possible, coarse and patina;
  • shapes – round, rounded edges, non-rectangular;
  • furniture less so it would not occupy the whole space and at least some piece of “attic”, ie., such as one that has already implied a certain age
  • art and decoration – abstract paintings and photographs, sketches expressing incompleteness – perhaps from our children, accessories of interesting shapes, colours and structures.

To make our home really a place where we feel absolutely free, freely, fetterless, we should listen to our feelings and take heed of our intuitions when arranging it. In that way, we use colours, materials, and objects that we love and that are pleasing to us.

 

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Wabi-Sabi Interior

A look at a wabi-sabi interior can remind us of the austerity of the industrial style, perhaps a little bit in celebration of the old times in a Provençal or a rural rustic style. But just like the philosophy itself, the interior according to wabi-sabi is characterized by simplicity, purity, naturality, asymmetry, and the appreciation of the flowing of time.

Unlike other interior design concepts, the wabi-sabi interior is not about an equipment with a specific style or a carefully set colour palette. It’s the art of appreciating space and what’s possibly already there from the past. It’s about the art of matching what we really need to buy with what we already have. It is certainly true that LESS IS MORE.

The wabi-sabi style is not suitable for supporters of consumerism. On the contrary, it is inclining towards a sustainable environmental approach. Things and equipment made of quality natural materials and in good quality design are not hurt by time or a gentle usage. Getting a patina of time often rather benefits them. And we do not change such things so often.

The interior in the spirit of wabi-sabi is not a place that you want to show off or impress other people with. Much more important than the appearance itself, is how you are feeling in it.

The home is conceived as a shrine of peace and tranquillity. A place where you can forget about the difficulties of the surrounding world, to relax, to meditate, but also to create and develop your creativity. A home based on wabi-sabi should be a place where you feel absolutely free and unrestrained.

If you’ve recently found demonstrations of interiors in the style of wabi-sabi in magazines, they were often very expensive residences. And often they are also homes of more or less well-known people (see the Robert Niro residence in New York). Recently, however, it is possible to see at least small signs of wabi-sabi inspiration even with Czech interior designers in arranging “normal” houses and flats. Whether for renovations of old apartment flats or family houses or also for new buildings.

But for an at least partial transformation of our home into the wabi-sabi style we do not need great finance or even a designer work. More on Wabi-Sabi Home.

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How I met with wabi-sabi in our old house

Almost twenty years ago, I and my husband moved, in anticipation of our eldest son, to the countryside not far from Prague, to a more than a hundred-year-old house. A lot of friends and relatives didn‘t understand why so far away (the boom of building and moving beyond the boundaries of Prague at that time hadn‘t started yet). But mainly, why such an old and thus imperfect, and even a little rusty house when “… After all, it would be better and easier to build a new house…”

I don’t know why, but somehow I always liked old houses more. Despite their imperfections. Houses that already have a certain patina of history that they‘ve “experienced“. Houses that have a particular spirit, atmosphere, something that isn‘t expressible in words.

We were founding a family and wanted a home. And in our cottage house, we just felt good right away. Even with all those irregular angles between the walls, exposed wooden beams with engraved markings from the carpenters in the attic and despite a few minor cracks in the walls, collapsing plaster and a lot of work that was obviously waiting for us…

The Money Pit (1986), Universal Pictures

Well, maybe it wasn’t as challenging as it was for Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in the movie The Money Pit from the year 1986. However, for a comfortable living, we had to gradually and sometimes with some difficulties take care of it both physically and financially.

Everyone knows old houses have their flies, so you can imagine the hundred-year-old one. But in some of those “errors of the beauty”, a certain poetry could be seen in those.

It is true that as probably every owner of such old real estate, even I had my weak moments. When you constantly keep changing and modifying your list of priorities for the reconstruction because of your spare time and finances, and then you visit friends in their perfectly finished new house. It does make you feel a bit of self-awareness. At least in the sense that your house will probably never be as perfectly and beautifully finished and never ever be looking so flawlessly. But then you realize neither their bright new house won‘t stay flawless forever. Over time even there is going to be “something” that is not as it should be, “something” that doesn’t work properly. It will take a while for their house to be properly tested over time.

I once accidentally stumbled into this text on the internet while researching something:

Pinterest

I have to say that, even though I had previously stayed in China for several months, I was never too deeply interested in Eastern philosophy. I had never heard of wabi-sabi before, but when I did, it sounded kind of nice. I had the feeling that the ideas are somehow kind of characterizing my view of the world around (for somebody maybe not contemporary).

Maybe initially I’ve associated it with the inner beauty of our imperfect building, which could be seen sometimes only by us – who are living here. Why should we forever worry about any imperfections, tiny cracks and all those other signs that time, weather, and loving use of the house by our predecessors left behind?

But the more I learn about the concept of wabi-sabi philosophy, the more I have this very inner feeling of happiness and peace, that everything is as it should be. It inspires me to more intensely perceive the beauty of everyday things.

I have printed, framed and mounted this picture on the wall. After some time a tiny, tiny crack appeared on the wall.

That was the beginning of my interest in the philosophy of wabi-sabi.

 

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