What Makes a Home?
Thoughts and recollections on how we bought a dead man’s apartment and made it our home
What makes a home?
‘Home’ is a word that is often thrown about in real estate advertisements when they want to cosy up the image of newly built apartment complexes or in shelter magazines about how even the most opulent celebrity homes retain some kind of essential homeliness that we are supposed to identify with.
Often, when we shop for furniture, we are also persuaded that a certain piece is essential to make the empty spaces in our apartments homely, where we can find comfort and safety.
These qualities are important and relevant, but for most of us, I suspect that the idea of home goes beyond mere tropes.
A home is not a house
In the poignant and deeply humane movie Nomadland, Frances McDormand plays Fern, a woman in her sixties, who after losing her husband and her house in the Great Recession, is forced into a far less glamorous #vanlife than what we see on Instagram.
Her existence is grindingly difficult and we are given close ups of what it means to not have a house of one’s own; the indignities that she had to suffer, like being told to move from parking spot to parking spot, or having to wash up in the cold open air.
And yet, there is a scene where Fern gently, but firmly informs the daughter of an old acquaintance that “I’m not homeless; I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”
Home then, is not just a physical space or an address, but a state of mind, a state of being even, where one can grow and where life happens.
Finding our Home
It was with such thoughts in our mind that when the opportunity arose for my partner to get his own apartment, I helped him find one that could embody the things he liked, the qualities that defined him and the things he might want to be.
We did not search long before we came chanced upon a place where the elderly owner had just died. The old man had lived there for maybe 40 years and the place was somewhat ramshackle and a bit grubby.
We never got a straight answer from the housing agent whether the old man died in the apartment itself.
But my partner didn’t mind.
He isn’t morbid and besides, the apartment must have had something to recommend it if its previous owner liked it so much to have stayed there for four decades.
Because we realised early on that home was also identity, my partner needed to feel there was potential for him to make the apartment his own. And because he loved open spaces, green and wide open views, he’d immediately understood how the view from the expansive windows could help him define his new home.
These windows served as the vantage point and place of observation from which he could look out across the expanse of our part of the city.
This good view was something my partner always wanted and it was the bedrock of his decision to choose the dead man’s apartment as the place to make his own home.
Another strong motivation behind my desire for my partner to get his own apartment was the fact that gay marriage isn’t allowed in still homophobic Singapore.
While we already shared my own apartment, the lack of legal protection for our partnership made me feel strongly that he had to own his own roof over his head, should anything happen to me.
So home was also security, because much as we admired Fern’s gumption and stoic spirit in Nomadland, living out of a van is simply not an option in Singapore, a tiny country barely larger than a mid-sized Amercan city.
It was with all these in mind that we decided that this was the apartment for my partner. And because it was old, it wasn’t too expensive, and he could pay for it in full, thereby ensuring that he would never want for shelter.
Home as a place of creation, creativity and function
Because my partner is a make up artist, having worked in the cosmetics company M.A.C. and Estée Lauder for more than 25 years, he’s had his share of work with celebrities like Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Patricia Fields etc.
His profession predisposes him to love colour and he wanted his home to reflect that love of hue and shade.
And yet, a home isn’t just a look; it also has to embody daily living, and be cosy enough for us both the relax and escape from the hurly burly of the world.
With so many considerations to take into account, I encouraged him to take his time and choose colours that conveyed both the vibrancy of his creative side with that other side of him that cherished calm and a certain homeliness.
In due time, he came up with an alchemy of pastels and primaries for different parts of our home.
He chose a more colourful palette for the kitchen and bathroom area, and a more subdued set of pastel shades for the living and dining areas.
Until today, a year later, I marvel at the calming tones that my partner chose for his apartment, which somehow manage to seem cool and warm at the same time, much like himself.
As importantly, an apartment has to succeed at daily living, meaning that even in a small one bedroom apartment like ours, you need to have functional zones for dining, relaxing in front of the TV, working and hosting friends.
These I think my partner’s apartment, now also our home, manages to do quite nicely within a not very big 819 square feet.
Home as a place of rest and refreshing
Finally, we needed to make our bedroom a place which could cocoon us from the stresses of the outside world, a place of privacy and refuge.
Bedrooms are the inner sanctums of every home, where we require the most privacy and peace, and in that regard, when contemplating what colours we wanted, my partner and I thought back to our past holidays by the sea, whether in Bali, or the Anambas Islands or Sicily.
The blues of all these places always felt peaceful, and so that was what we chose to have our bed float in a metaphorical sea of blue along the the walls of our bedroom, with the sky of the windows above lighting up the otherwise bare walls.
By this slow process of accretion, of building up the core structure of our home and then adding on complementary colours and textures, did my partner and I transform that old apartment the a dead man left us into a home once more for the living.
Last words
The process of doing up my partner’s apartment taught us that a home does need to be many things at once: a place of refuge and safety, a place of identity, a place of comfort, a place of entertaining and hosting, and yes, sometimes a place of work.
While it wasn’t easy to balance all these needs of ours, I found that when we put our minds to it, there can be a frisson of creation that can lead us to unanticipated and sublime bursts of certainty and creativity if we let it.
One lesson we did learn was not to rush.
It’s important to look deep within ourselves and at the risk of sounding a bit woo-woo, to let the essence of our being suffuse our decision-making about how we might craft our home.
In the end, it really was feel and instinct about what we were, as much as practical deliberation and a rational apportionment of spaces, that led us to finally complete this apartment that we now call our home.
My partner and I, we sometimes argue and bicker, and his apartment is not large, nor particularly fancy.
But it's enough and I think it suits us and I hope that we get to live here a long time, and maybe even grow old together.
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