I've been pretty nomadic my whole adult life, but these days I can barely stand to leave my apartment, and it isn't that my apartment is exactly a luxury, multi-room home. In fact, I'd be happy if it had a real kitchen, or a bedroom.

But it's home. I've only been in this apartment for about six months, and I bought a bunch of used furniture to furnish it, so it isn't even as if the place is stuffed with my favorite old furnishings.

Plus, my home is in New York City, a fact that until a couple of months ago would have only increased its appeal. I could flee the city, even for a weekend, but I'm reluctant to go: there is a tremendous comfort in sitting here in my own place, with my books on the shelves and the white roses I bought last week opening up in the sun.

It's the comfort of my own style, I realize. Even though the furnishings aren't things I've owned for long, and many are flea-market cast-offs, they are the things I like, the things I want to look at: an old wooden desk chair that makes up in aesthetics what it lacks in comfort; a 1940s rose-printed tablecloth; a wooden dictionary stand.

And of course, there are the few things I brought with me when I moved here, the old Mexican blanket, my grandmother's celery-green lamp, my Oxford English Dictionary.

And so maybe the comfort that I find in my home these days comes from the familiarity of my own taste, from being surrounded by the things that reflect back to me who I am. In these days of such uncertainty, when we don't know what is what, all we can keep coming back to is who we are, and that's best manifested in the things of our world, the things with which we surround ourselves.
 

~Sarah Van Arsdale

Sheffield School of Interior Design

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