What’s your home decoration style?
Today’s writing prompt asked about my home decoration style, and I had to admit I have never chosen a palette or followed a theme in my life. So instead of answering it, I walked through the house one evening with a notebook and sorted every object I could see into three columns: inherited, chosen, given. It took less than an hour. What I found was that the column containing everything I actually selected for myself was by far the shortest of the three. Two of the three columns had been filled by other people entirely. Try the same audit in your own home this week. It costs you nothing and it tells you a great deal.
Inherited, Chosen, Given
An Audit of My Home, in Answer to a Simple Question
The prompt asks what my home decoration style is. I read it twice and found that I had no answer of the kind the question expects. I have never selected a palette. No theme runs through my rooms. If a visitor were to ask which school of design I follow, I would have to confess that I follow none, and that the question has never once occurred to me while living in this house.
So I did what a draftsman does when the language of a question does not fit the facts before him. I changed the classification.
Instead of asking what style my house is decorated in, I walked through it one evening and sorted everything I could see under three heads: what I inherited, what I chose, and what I was given. It took less than an hour. What it revealed about my house, and rather less comfortably about my life, was worth a great deal more than a paragraph on colour schemes.
I. Inherited
This column filled quickly. The old wooden almirah that came from my parents. The brass lamp. The framed photographs on the wall, in which everyone is younger than I am now. The clock that has been slow for as long as I can remember and which nobody has ever thought to repair. The crucifix that hung in my mother’s room and now hangs in mine.
Not one of these things was selected by me. They came down. They arrived in this house the way a legal right arrives by succession, without negotiation and without receipt, and they took their places before I had any opinion about where they should stand.
Furniture that has outlived the hands that bought it acquires an authority no showroom piece can imitate. I do not keep the almirah because it is handsome; by any modern measure it is not. I keep it because it was hers, and because the house would be lighter without it in a way that has nothing to do with weight.
II. Chosen
Here my own taste, such as it is, was free to speak. And what it said, when I finally listened, was humbling.
The bookshelves, built to a measurement rather than bought. The writing table, chosen for its depth. The reading lamp, chosen for its angle. The chair, chosen because I would be sitting in it for long hours and knew it. Almost everything I selected deliberately, I selected in order to work.
Left to my own devices, it seems, I do not decorate a home. I equip a study. A man’s deliberate purchases are a quiet confession, and mine confess that I have spent a working life at a desk and did not want to leave it even after office hours ended for good. I am not sure whether to be pleased about this. I record it as I found it.
III. Given
Gifts are the strangest category of all, because a gift is chosen by another person for a room they do not live in. By every logic of design, this column should be the untidiest. Nothing in it matches anything else in it.
The wall clock presented at a farewell. The framed picture from a friend, which I would never have bought and would never now remove. The memento on the shelf with an inscription in small letters that visitors have to lean forward to read. The rosary carried back from a pilgrimage by someone who thought of me while they were far away.
And yet these are the objects I would defend most fiercely. A gift is a statement that somebody, at some moment, held me in mind while choosing. The object is only the evidence. What is actually sitting on my shelf is the fact of having been thought about.
IV. What the Three Columns Told Me
When I finished, I counted. The middle column, the one containing everything I actually chose, was by a clear margin the shortest of the three.
Two of the three columns in my house were filled by other people. The dead furnished one and the living furnished the other. My own contribution was a desk, some shelves and a good lamp.
That is the honest answer to the prompt. My home is not decorated. It is deposited. It is a record of who has passed through this family and who has stayed close to it, arranged by no principle whatsoever except affection, and holding together for exactly that reason.
If you want to know your own decoration style, do not begin by asking what you like. Begin by asking what you have been handed, and by whom, and whether you have ever thanked them for it.
A Last Thought
A house furnished largely by inheritance and by gift is a house that has been loved. That is not a design principle. It is something better.
And what is true of the house is true of the life. Very little of what I most value did I acquire for myself. Nearly all of it was handed to me: by parents who are no longer here to be thanked, by colleagues and friends who thought of me when they need not have, and, if I am honest about the deepest inheritance of all, by a grace I did nothing whatever to earn and could not have purchased at any price.
My decoration style, it turns out, does have a name. Gratitude.
What would your three columns look like? Walk through your rooms this evening and count. I would be glad to know which column came out longest.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 29 July 2026
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