20-03-2025
What Does It Mean to Call Somewhere Home?
Because my family moved so much when I was growing up — nine cities and maybe 20 residences before I left for college — I never associated the idea of home with a physical space. Rather, I thought of details, rooms, pieces of furniture, slants of light, from the many houses and apartments we'd occupied over the years: features and moments that came to stand in for a sense of rootedness.
For years, I wished I'd known a home, a single residence in which decades of celebrations, fights, debates and conversations could have unfolded. Then I got older and watched as friends confronted the sale or destruction of their own family homes; they understood that they weren't as much mourning the loss of the structure itself as what it had represented, but that knowledge didn't make it easier. A home — the home — provides the set for all the theater of our lives; without one, we're freer, but also unmoored.
This issue visits families with different relationships to home. Outside of São Paulo, a Brazilian furniture designer and her grown children have constructed a compound that accommodates three generations — while allowing everyone some privacy. Over in Italy, an English art dealer decides to recommit to Venice — a city about which he's had mixed feelings — only to realize that his new apartment in a 17th-century palazzo isn't so new after all … but someplace he knew as a teenager. And finally, our cover story concerns the three residences designed by the Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, north of Stockholm. Since the 1940s (Carl died in 1919; Karin in 1928), their first house, called Lilla Hyttnäs, has been maintained by a group of their descendants. Some of it is open to visitors; other parts are private.
The result, a century after the Larssons' deaths, is a home that maintains much of their art, furniture and spirit while also graciously accommodating improvisations and additions from subsequent generations. All this is in keeping with the Larssons' original vision; theirs would be a place free from the constraints of what they viewed as the tedium of bourgeois design of the period, with its dark brown furniture and neo-Renaissance ornamentation. Their house would be a celebration of folk art, of craft, of color and coziness. Not a house, in other words — but a home.
