My name is Tessa Marchetti, and this is where I write down the things that hold a house together.
I have lived in the same house for a long time now. Long enough that the third stair still creaks in the same place, that I know which cupboard door has to be shut twice, and that most of what sits on my shelves arrived here from somebody else’s house first. My mother’s quilt is upstairs. My grandmother’s ring is in a small box in a drawer I open more often than I need to. My husband still argues with me about directions in the car. Our daughter and our son have their own homes now, and a grandson comes through the back door without knocking, which is exactly how I want it.
What this site is about
The table people sit around. The keepsakes nobody quite knows what to do with. The traditions that survived, and the ones that quietly stopped. Holidays at home, the making and mending we do with our hands, the photographs we finally get off the phone and onto a wall, the small repeated rituals of an ordinary weekday, and what it takes to make a guest feel like they were expected.
None of that is decorating advice. I am not a designer and I have never staged a room. I write about the objects and the habits that carry meaning, and about what happens to them over the years, because that is the part nobody warns you about.
How I write these
I write about what has already happened here. If I mended something badly the first time, that goes in. If a tradition I loved turned out to be a burden on everyone else, that goes in too. I would rather tell you the version with the mistake in it, because the mistake is usually where the useful part hides.
What you will not find
No staged photographs of my own rooms. The images here illustrate an idea, and I am not going to pretend my mantel looks like that on a Tuesday. No shopping lists dressed up as sentiment. No ghostwriter, no team, and nothing I have quietly been paid to admire. Where I think something is not worth buying, I say so.
You are welcome to write to me at [email protected].