🟧 My grandparents’ lamp
Growing a new relationship with a domestic object
Kyle Chayka: Whenever I get back from a trip or vacation, I’m often struck by this immediate reevaluation of my surroundings, perhaps due to the subconscious frustration that our apartment is not a hotel room and I own more possessions than a suitcase’s worth. I bump into everything. There’s too much stuff everywhere. But it also inspires an appreciation for what I do love, the things I enjoy coming back to that build up a sense of home. One of those things is a recent addition: a lamp from my late grandparents’ house that I installed in front of the bookshelves in our living room, replacing an aging IKEA light. The lamp is a serious presence. It’s basically a tall block of stone, marble with rough grooves carved into each side running down its height like a block prepared for further carving. The lampshade at its top is unusually tall and wide, too. The effect is sculptural and Brancusi-ish; it’s a small monument. (Adding to the atmosphere, it sits atop a worn-in English side table from Jess’s family.)
Throughout my life, up until we took it out of my grandparents’ house before it passed to its new owners last year, I remember seeing the lamp on a kind of geometric storage chest made of dark wood in their living room. It always stood sentinel there, emitting a soft glow in the high-ceilinged space. Its materials and its sheer weight — somewhere above fifty pounds of rock — made it look permanent, like something that would never move. Their house, which they had built in 1983 in central New York, was much more modernist than its neighbors, with long sloped roofs and tall windows cut through in unexpected places. My grandmother took correspondence classes in interior design and laid the rooms out carefully. The low-slung furniture was interspersed with paintings and small sculptures collected by my grandfather during his international travels working on radar systems as a veteran in the aftermath of World War II. Everything in their home fit perfectly together with a cultivated nonchalance.
I don’t know the provenance of the lamp, nor am I sure when they bought it. There’s no sticker or brand logo on the bottom. I can’t trace it back to the hand of a particular designer or movement, but it is proudly a design object, a thing that states its presence in a room. My taste for mid-century style probably came from my grandparents’ house — it was where I understood what it felt like to inhabit one of those spaces, not just look at a vintage photo in a museum catalogue. Now, I’m happy that it slotted easily into the aesthetic of our apartment, which is still a gesamtkunstwerk in progress lacking the half-century in a single place that my grandparents had to stock up. It sits among other vintage heirlooms as well as the stuff we’ve gotten from Room & Board, the IKEA faux built-ins, the Alessi utensils, the David Mellor-sourced bowls, the Hay sidetable, the mid-century mirror from Good Wood. Each object pushes our domestic sensibility in a slightly new direction, ideally contributing to a new whole.
When I went to turn the stone lamp on the other morning, when DC was in the midst of a snowstorm, I had a flash of thought, or perhaps sympathetic memory. I was reaching under the shade to twist the small black switch on just as my grandparents had many thousands of times when the lamp was theirs. It made me feel close to them — the lamp is an heirloom, but a functional one, a thing that I now interact with constantly. The mundane object and the action endures, as does the more ethereal spirit that its previous owners imbued the lamp with, though they are gone. All contained in that carved pillar that an artisan made with their own hands. Not every object can be so weighted with meaning — it would be unbearable to live in a room full of them, like eating a full meal of Proustian madeleines. But it’s nice to notice the growth of my relationship with a thing, a new step in its existence and my own.
Best of One Thing
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Beautiful article. It's making me rethink some of my furnishings.