Three things I haven’t yet seen addressed in this thread:
What about houses where there are NO towels and NO soap in the bathroom, decorative or not? I’ve resorted to rinsing my hands then drying them with toilet paper in those cases. And I’m sorry, if you’re trying to impress me with your elegant hostess skills – and you’re cooking me dinner – I want to see a little evidence that you take handwashing seriously.
When my ex-girlfriend moved in with me, she moved the toilet plunger from next to the toilet into a box in the utility room. When asked why she did this, she replied “Because it looks tacky in the bathroom. I want a nice looking bathroom.” Yeah. Because having a floor covered with raw sewage will make it look like freakin’ Buckingham Palace. (That toilet was notorious for clogging.)
I’ve seen some Portuguese-American homes where there is a fully functioning kitchen upstairs that is never to be used. A stove that has never heated, a dishwasher that has never washed, and a fridge that is busy cooling nothing but air. What a waste!
Liberal:We have a parlor. […] We do not have the room because we are pretentious. […] We saved money for years to afford it. We have the room because it is beautiful. And we love beauty.
Fine by me. I was just explaining to Sunspace what the traditional etiquette skinny is on “vestigial” rooms that are considered too good, and/or too expensive, to be actually used.
tdn: *I’ve seen some Portuguese-American homes where there is a fully functioning kitchen upstairs that is never to be used. *
?? How can you have a vestigial kitchen? I would think that that would be about the one room in the house that you pretty much have to subject to actual use. Are the homeowners doing all their cooking down in the basement on a camping stove, or what?
Yeah, I know, but I don’t get it. How is any work of art “actually used”? Who is Miss Etiquette to say that a decorated room cannot be the aesthetic equivalent of a hung painting? I mean, would she say that a Picasso is useless unless you give your guests fingerpaints to sling at it?
I think the difference is that most people will have plenty of wallspace whether to hang a $5 poster of Britney in a bikini or an original signed Dali lithograph. Regardles of income, hanging crap on the wall is for the most part, purely aesthetic. It’s not supposed to have a “use” other than the enjoyment of looking at it. A decorated room could be the equivalent of a fine painting, sure, but it’s a fairly rare and IMO extravagant practice. It goes against the actual purpose for which rooms are usually made. Unlike wall art.
Having the extra money to own a home big enough that you can have one room to do nothing but display expensive furniture that no one is allowed to use is a luxury few people can afford. And, depending on the owner of said room and their behaviour about it, has the potential to come across as being very stuck-up and/or pretentious or the “this room is too good for you” thing. Of course there’s nothing wrong with having such a room if you can afford it, but I would be sensitive to how you treat it and present it to houseguests. I don’t think I would be comfortable spending time at someone’s house that was filled with things I was afraid to touch.
I agree with you in that furnishings most certainly can be art, but it most cases it is also functional art, which means you use it. I don’t see the point in having a room full of stuff no one’s allowed to use, but that’s just me. If it was something that delicate and important it probably belongs in a museum somewhere. IMO.
I have nothing against decorative soaps as long as there’s also obvious REAL soap available, to eliminate confusion. The poster (sorry, forgot who) who wants to display the decorative soap from her mother might put it in a pretty, COVERED glass dish, or maybe wrapped in nylon net, far off to the side, or maybe on top of the toilet tank, nowhere near the bottle of Dial that’s right next to the sink.
These are my bathroom preparations when I’m expecting guests (besides the usual cleaning, of course): (1) Top off and wipe down the bottle of Softsoap and (2) replace our old, ratty, mismatched, “everyday” hand towel and washcloth with one of the nice sets I bought specifically to put out for company. These are not excessively expensive-looking or anything like that, they just look fairly new, color-coordinated, and fit for human use.
Here’s my gripe: WHY OH WHY do people feel compelled to decorate the bathroom with fish and seashells? It’s not the beach. Yes, there’s running water in here. Ha ha. But your tub is not a boat, and your toilet is not a beach chair. It’s the shitter, OK? And putting fish on it ain’t gonna change that.
Our kids stayed with a Portuguese woman for a while before they went to preschool and she had a very nice kitchen with newish appliances–stove, refrigerator, dishwasher and everything. I never saw her do more than heat a can of soup in there. She cooked all the family meals on an old stove out in the garage. The only thing I could figure was that she was busy with the kids all day, but still wanted her kitchen to be immaculate at all times, as was the rest of the house.
Do people really tell their guests “you can’t use this room”?
I ask because…my parents’ house has a room we pretty much never use, but we don’t tell people not to. We just never entertain there, and sl they sort of get the idea that they should be in one of the rooms we do use. And anyway the basement and the family room are more comfortable because you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re getting oils from your hands on a silk chair or anything like that. Besides, I don’t think we’d shoo people out if they chose to sit there and talk or read for some reason, though we’d find it kind of odd because we’re never really in there ourselves.
jin:I don’t see the point in having a room full of stuff no one’s allowed to use, but that’s just me. If it was something that delicate and important it probably belongs in a museum somewhere.
I agree on the whole, but it sounds like what Lib was talking about was more along the lines of the “museum room” I mentioned in an earlier post (i.e., homeowner collects furnishings of a particular period, sets up one room as a “period reconstruction” space to contain them).
A fancy room that’s simply red-zoned as Too Good To Use generally does seem kind of pretentious and depressing. On the other hand, a fancy room that’s deliberately set up as a pure showcase, where nobody even thinks of using the items but just walks around openly examining them on display, as it were, is more along the lines of a home museum. As such, it falls (IMHO) more in the category of Quirky Personal Choices About Use of Space—as do private billiard rooms, ballrooms, indoor sculpture gardens, and home pipe organs—which don’t run afoul of the “too good for you” problem.
Like the “vestigial best room”, though, it has the slight disadvantage of putting one’s aesthetic ass on the line. I mean, in a room you actually use, it’s expected that you’ll always have to make a few compromises between taste and utility and convenience. In a “museum room”, though, you got no cover. You are saying right up front “This is what we consider absolutely the most beautiful stuff and the most beautiful way to arrange it that we could possibly think of. Isn’t it lovely?!” If your taste level happens to be such that the result looks like a Barbie Dream House renovated by Mr. T, your guests are going to have to be pretty diplomatic.
(Maybe that’s another etiquette drawback to the “museum room”: it potentially violates the etiquette rule against Bragging About Your Stuff. But I suppose it all depends on how you treat it. It’s one thing to say “Now let me show you our museum room, I’m sure you’ll appreciate all our beautiful things!”—tacky tacky. But if a guest peeks in the door and says “Oh my, what a gorgeous room!”, Miss Manners condones a modest response of “Oh thank you, those are just some things we specially like—would you care to see them?” If the guest gets an eyeful of Mr. T’s Dream House and recoils in shock, of course, it’s best to let it pass. :))
When I was a kid we had a formal front parlor that was kept clean for guests. It was near the front of the house so if someone who could not be permitted into the kitchen like a normal person dropped in unexpectedly there were a few chairs to sit on that weren’t piled with laundry. Sometimes I think I’d like to a room like that for myself. When friends call to say they are about to drop buy I feel obliged to run through the front room picking up the inevitable books and empty tea cups that accumulate.
I’ll agreee that small, molded soaps are just silly.
TDG:When I was a kid we had a formal front parlor that was kept clean for guests. […] Sometimes I think I’d like to a room like that for myself.
Of course, that’s not a “museum room” or “vestigial best room”, that’s just an actual “best room”, because you did actually entertain guests in it sometimes. There’s no etiquette rule against having a more formal space that you use only for your fancier company.
It’s when you never use that space, because none of your company ever seems fancy enough to be worth the trouble, that you start looking like somebody who thinks more highly of their furniture than of their guests.
We love for people to use our parlor. It’s just that some won’t. This past Christmas, it was where we all gathered to drink eggnog and sing carols. My mother-in-law played the piano (beautifully), and a good time was had by all. We don’t want unruly kids or big dogs in it, but still…
Liberal:We love for people to use our parlor. It’s just that some won’t.
Okay, but you didn’t make that clear before. In your original post about your parlor, you said:
Liberal:We have actually had people who refuse to walk through the room, or step on the rug, or touch anything in it. But there have been others who do as we do, and stand in it or just outside it, gawking, marvelling, and admiring.
Sounded to me, and obviously also to jin and others, as though nobody (including the owners) used the room for anything except “gawking, marvelling, and admiring”.
Obviously, if you are using the room sometimes for socializing, then it isn’t actually a “museum room” or a “vestigial best room”, it’s just an actual “best room” like TDG’s family used to have.
(And I am relieved to hear that somebody actually plays the piano there sometimes! It always seems kind of sad to sacrifice the voice of a working musical instrument in order to make it a mere decorative accessory in an unused room.)
That is precicely why we bought a house that did not have a separate living room and great room. And it was tough to find one, too. Most houses in our price range in the neighborhood we chose had both. I dislike cleaning and was determined not to have a room I didn’t use that still had to be dusted and vacuumed. We use our dining room as a study. It’s actually a bit small for a dining room, but perfect for an office. We have 3 bedrooms, one is the master, one is my sewing room and one is the guest room, which gets used fairly often. Having extras space just because one can afford it seems wasteful to me.
And to add to the OP, I don’t have decorative soap or towels in the guest/hall bath. Liquid soap and regular towels. And when I paint and redecorate it, there will be nice towels and accessories, but they will definately be fully useable. I used to own decorative rose scented soap in a nice Mikasa silver bowl, but the bowl is too high maintainance and the soaps lost their scent long ago and got tossed in favor of allergy-free unscented stuff.
We do have fuzzy covers on the toilets, but they are not mine, I inherited them when I aquired The Elf, I have no idea why he even uses them, but they match the rug. They will not be reused in the remodel.
Could be that they just like fish and seashells, and decortating any other room of the house (aside from maybe a kid’s room) in a sealife theme is a little weird.
Decorative soaps make the ghost of William Morris cry:
“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Holy cow. I guess all I can say is that if I leave something out, don’t assume it. You didn’t mention that you wanted every possible detail and stray thought either, so I didn’t provide it. With respect to Jinwick, I didn’t get the same sense of “you should have described it differently” that I’m getting (and seem always to get) from you. We do use the room, but very seldom, although we look forward to circumstances when we can. We are very discriminating about it. If you want dates, I’ll try to give you dates.
Why the hell would I be unable or unwilling to get my meaning across? I wish you would stop confusing my meaning with yours. Just because you thought something was missing or you tried to read something between the lines and found it wasn’t there, stop projecting your bullshit demands for perfect clarity (i.e., mind reading) onto me. You’re just pissed that a couple of people liked my parlor after your condemnation of it. Sometimes, you’re just a bitch. Clear enough?
