Who Cares if It’s a Rental? Swap Out the Curtains, Put Up Wallpaper, Go Crazy
Above: Jill and Polly in the Bathroom (1987), by Tina Barney.
I’m writing this on the cusp of sweater weather, already wearing one of sky blue that says not my first rodeo in white letters. This morning, I switched from my summer perfume to Ffern’s new seasonal scent and have written out a comprehensive list of the changes that will need to be made to my rented apartment in order to get it ready for the colder weather. It’s a semiannual ritual.
Of course we’ll change the bedding from linen to percale; and of course I’ll swap out the floral candles for a hit of ecclesiastical French smoke. I’ll switch the soap in the bathroom—I like fig for October and the first two weeks of November—and get asters and dahlias and Seckel pears to display on the table and a couple of quinces to put on the mantel, the best home fragrance of all. I like to order fresh walnuts from a farm in California so I can put out a bowl, with a bizarre nutcracker embossed with Shakespeare’s head, for my guests.
But before that, we’ll need to take up the scallop-edged jute matting and lay down the Nichols rugs that have been rolled up all summer in the coat closet, their faded jewel tones hopefully protected from moths by the presence of a bunch of Santa Maria Novella potpourri, on the long-ago advice of a Zitomer saleswoman. Then we’ll have to take down the light muslin summer curtains so as to hang the heavier velvet drapes—a two-person job—and finally, I’ll pull the sea-green canvas slipcovers (made by the peerless United Decorators of Coney Island) off the sofa and the two big chairs from the Long Island tag sale, and they’ll be a rosy velvet again. The cushion covers, the piles of wool throws, and the changing of lampshades is the fun part.
“Isn’t that a lot of work?” asked a nonplussed colleague when I detailed these thrilling weekend plans.
I guess so, kind of. I didn’t grow up like this; my family’s home was lively and chaotic, and I longed for the seasonal order I read about in books like Tasha Tudor’s A Time to Keep and Betsy-Tacy. I learned the term house-proud from The Borrowers, and at once I loved that notion of pride even in impermanence.
Recently I read Little House in the Big Woods, for the first time in decades, to my four-year-old son, and I was again enchanted by the changes the seasons wrought on their cabin, the transitions from airy to cozy that lent their challenging life order and reassurance and a measure of control. We aren’t precarious homesteaders on the wrong side of the postbellum law; we buy fresh fruit all winter, and by city law our building will go tropical at the end of October, global warming or not. But these stories—of lives governed by transparent willpower, of spring cleanings and winter bunkering and an impractical urge to beauty—formed me, and I can’t change now.
Home is my refuge. I’ve always brought an intense degree of interest to my surroundings—my freshman dorm room was a source of bafflement for my roommates, and the maximalism of my desks has raised the eyebrows of every coworker I’ve ever had.
The apartment where I live with my husband and our son isn’t palatial; it’s got good New York City prewar bones and decent light and enough space for a respectable Brio train track, but it’s not full of quirky charm or period detail. We don’t own it and never will.
But I have managed to make it deeply singular. I hang real wallpaper; I replace doorknobs with the white marble orbs I find at the flea market that feel so satisfying in the hand; I lay down squares of speckled pink linoleum even knowing the building will rip them up the moment I move out. I need my family to imprint on these spaces; that’s what makes a home, and that’s also what makes friends feel welcome.
We don’t have a second home: This is it, summer and winter, and so it feels vitally important that we mark the passing of the seasons, even if nature no longer can.
After the last summer decor shift, I made an Instagram post detailing the seasonal changes I’d undertaken. Until then, I don’t think I’d realized that it was an especially unusual thing to do. And when I was asked to write about it, it started what Barbara Pym calls “a landslide in the mind.” Was this about control in a world where we have so little of it, or an imposition of some nostalgic idea of seasonality? Maybe both. Maybe that’s fine. What I do believe is that there is great power in not just accepting the reality of your life, but in finding great pleasure there too.
Just don’t expect to ever see that security deposit again.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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