For people who aren’t familiar with Montreal apartments, the incredible length of our apartment tends to surprise them. It is a skinny apartment with one hallway running the entire length and all the rooms come off it to the right. From the front door, you can see the back wall. It’s a relatively pretty apartment too, or at least I like to think so!
It also has a very large kitchen for Montreal, since the landlord had one tiny bedroom removed to make a large closet for the (also tiny) bedroom, put in the connections for a washer and dryer, and enlarging the kitchen. We have a steel countertop too, but that’s just something we bought at IKEA!
Other than that, I suppose the conversation pieces are the cats, the Roomba or the painting on our living room wall that we bought in Haiti (of villagers doing laundry, basically!)
We have two car seats that we found in the alley a week after we moved in. My roommate put wheels on them. Inevitably when we have a lot of people over, someone manages to tip over backwards while sitting in them. The person is never hurt (the chairs are well padded) but it’s a miracle our cats haven’t been killed.
We just moved but hopefully the conversation piece in my house will be my aquarium. It’s going to be a challenge, but it’s going to be open topped, heavily planted and CO2 fertilized, set up in the sunroom. If all goes well the plants will be able to grow emergent and bloom.
I’ve done this before with artificial lighting and the tank is usually a hit with the guests. This will be more challenging with the amount of sunlight the tank will get, but it should be fun.
I live in an apartment, so I can’t say we have tons of cool, antique or valuable things lying around. The closest I have to a conversation piece is this , which is hanging over my living room sofa. It is enormous, about 4’ x 5’ and I’ve been surprised how many times people remark on it. Since I bought it in Tonalá, Mexico, near Guadalajara, it gives me the opportunity to talk about my summer in Mexico… finding, purchasing, packaging and dragging that painting all the way to Office Depot to mail it home is a particularly vivid memory of mine. Particularly the dragging part…
I was somewhat surprised and disappointed to hear so many people comment that we have so many books in the house. We’re not terribly well read academically speaking I suppose, we just all like to read. I thought it was fairly sad not to enjoy a book or two.
When we got our first cat, we needed to separate the cat food and the pooches (else we’d have one lean kitten). Lots of thought went into it, and we started looking into spiral staircases to see if we could shrink plans or something. We unexpectedly found exactly what we were looking for.
The pictures on that site don’t do it justice. It is floor-to-ceiling height, we stained it in contrasting (dark/light) colors, changed the traction carpeting to an oriental pattern, and it’s covered in lush plants (one vines around it).
Set between two windows in the parlor, it looks nothing like a piece of cat furniture, and everything like a custom plant stand. The conversation starts when one of the cats trots toward it, then spirals up to the top platform to grab a snack.
Then there’s the collection of African percussion instruments over the piano, the human skull nestled in the library, and so on…
We have a 33’ Airstream Land Yacht in the backyard. It was originally to be our temporary home while building a place, but it turned out easier to just fix a place than build one. Hopefully the Airstream will be gutted this year and turned into a combination guest house, pool house bar, and opium den.
There’s a large poster of myself hanging on the wall from when I was body painted from head to toe at a Burning Man Festival, that usually turns a few heads.
I had assistance from some cousins when I moved out of my apartment. One was packing up the contents of a small bookcase from my bedroom – the books fit into 8 or so small boxes (about the size used to ship 12 bottles of wine). She repeatedly commented that she had never seen so many books in one place.
I have a few pieces of Fiestaware that seem to attract a lot of attention, even from people unfamiliar with the line. One of my favorites is a yellow casserole (minus its lid) that was sold for $1 as a promotional piece when Fiesta was introduced. Another interesting little item that gets a comment or two is an engineering drawing book that dates from the 1920s…besides advice such as “do not use your T-square as a hammer,” one of the first chapters features an exercise in drawing what was, at the time, nothing more than a popular good-luck symbol.
A painting my SO and I had made for us, during our first visit to Africa. It’s about 20" tall and 8’ long. We had it designed to go in a hallway we had. Now it sits nicely over the fireplace mantle. It’s a stylize village scene, black and white except for orange anyplace there is fire. In the background is Mount Kilimanjaro.
