Why Every Thoughtful Home Has One Imperfect Object

There is, in almost every home that has been seriously considered, an object that does not quite fit the category of beautiful. It is chipped, or irregular, or its glaze ran during firing and pooled at the base in a way the potter did not intend. It is kept anyway. Often it is the most used thing in the room.

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is frequently cited in design writing and almost as frequently misunderstood. It is not a visual style. It is not the instruction to buy things that look rustic or handmade. It is a philosophical orientation toward impermanence, toward the kind of beauty that time produces rather than prevents.

The wabi-sabi object is not beautiful despite its flaws. It is beautiful because its flaws are a record of time. The crack in the tea bowl that has been repaired with gold, the practice known as kintsugi, does not pretend the break did not happen. It makes the break the most visible part of the object's history. The repair becomes the story.

What this requires of the owner is a particular relationship with possession. The Western model of object ownership tends toward preservation: the thing must be kept as close to its original state as possible. Age and use are problems to be managed. The wabi-sabi model is closer to companionship: the object changes with you, acquires the evidence of your relationship with it, becomes more specific to your life over time.

The practical consequence of this is that the most interesting homes are rarely the most pristine. A kitchen that has been cooked in seriously for twenty years looks different from one that has been used carefully. The cutting board that is scarred and seasoned from daily use, the copper pan whose exterior has darkened from heat, the linen that has been washed so many times it has become a different thing from what it was in the shop. These objects carry information.

There is also something to be said about the psychological effect of imperfect objects in the home. Perfection in domestic spaces produces a specific kind of anxiety: the anxiety of maintenance, of the gap between the space as it was intended and the space as it is lived in. Imperfect objects relieve this. They have already been broken, already been used. They absorb the minor accidents of daily life without accusation.

The thoughtful home tends to understand this intuitively. Alongside the things that are beautiful in the conventional sense, the clean lines and the good materials, there is always something that tells a different story. The bowl from a local market that cost very little and has been used every day for years. The glass that does not match the others. The thing that was a mistake and turned out to be the best object in the house.

That is the object worth keeping. Not because it is perfect. Because it is yours.