10 things that make a happy home

In fashion, they talk about cost per wear but in life, we should value “things” according to cost per smile. Not because they function but because of how they make you feel.

The light, the music, the art... it’s the small, emotive things that make a house a happy home. (Pic: iStock)

Two years ago, I bought a green wallet. It was just a little thing — something bright, something different from my usual beige — that made me happy every time I used it. Think Jackie Kennedy in a boxy Kelly green jacket after John died. That green.

My wallet has given pleasure well beyond the $70 it cost and in spite of the meagre funds it typically holds. In fashion, they talk about cost per wear but in life I reckon we should value “things” according to cost per smile.

It’s an approach I’m following as I prepare to move on. As I rid my home of the stuff of an old life and start to think of a new one. What will we take? What is useful? What swells my heart when I see it or use it? Or, more often, what were we thinking when we bought that?! (A juicer with 17 detachable parts, a wind chime so heavy it takes a 60 knot gust to produce even a pitiful tinkle, multiple pairs of bright pants purchased when colour blocking was chic. Alas, there is more.)

Whatever the home mags prescribe, I’ve learned that the best stuff not just functions but makes you feel. It’s those belongings imbued with memory and magic and rendered beautiful by being ours. So here’s what’s going with us:

10 things I hope will make a happy home

1. Light

I’m not sure how we package up the sun that streams in our windows and dances across the floors. For 15 years we’ve been doused in light — the clear bright honesty of a new day erasing whatever may have troubled the one before. I can’t take it, of course. But I’ll find it somewhere else.

2. Bose speaker

I can leave the TV, the hair dryer, the irascible, ever-dysfunctioning printer, but the (bottom-of-the-range) speaker has delivered the soundtrack to our lives. We’ve danced to Patsy Cline and The Beatles and been driven demented by The Wiggles. Dido’s Thank You will always mark the day we brought our second, hard won, daughter back from the hospital.

Tweezers just get women. (Pic: iStock)

3. The blue vase

It’s never held a single bloom but the way the glass has been blown to slide down over a shelf makes it one of the loveliest things I’ve ever owned. My friend Hilary bought it for me even though I neglected to respond to her text with attached pic: “What do you think? So you”. It is so me. And so her to know that. It may lack flowers but there’s a whole bunch of friendship in that one perfect thing.

4. Tweezers

There must be 100 bottles and tubes delivering all manner of potions in my bathroom but only one item earns desert island status. Whoever invented these little beauties knew the challenges of women: eyebrows, splinters, ticks, a beloved earring stuck between the boards of a deck.

5. The bougainvillea

Short of digging it up and dismantling the veranda around which it grows, this gorgeous purple flower fest will have to stay. Bought as a shrub, no taller than the two-year-old trailing through the farmer’s market with me when I spotted it, this single plant smiles at me every time I return home. It speaks of summers at my grandmother’s, a lovers’ holiday in Greece, the triumph of nature over neglect. There’ll be another. Red next time.

Carrie Bradshaw did know how to deck out an apartment. (Pic: Sex and the City)

6. The art

I couldn’t afford it or the shipping or the customs tax but when a gorgeous Paul Smith tapestry stitched with the letters L-O-V-E beamed from a shop window on a freezing London night I knew I had to have it anyway. Years later, Sarah Jessica Parker would feature one in her flat in Sex in the City. But I had mine first. Years later, I love it even harder.

7. Kitchen tongs

Keep your mortar and pestles and fancy knives and never-used pasta makers because the one thing that earns its keep in the kitchen is tongs. I suspect you could butter toast with them in a crisis. Honourable mention: wooden spoons.

8. The photograph

The two of them, aged five and two, playing on the rocks and poking at anemones, the camera forgotten. They will always have something I’ve never had: a sister.

9. The cookbook

Amid the Nigellas and Jamies there’s an unassuming little volume that goes wherever I do. The Edmond’s Cookery Book is as kiwi as the All Blacks and its recipes for ginger crunch and Louise cake are my childhood in a tin.

10. The breadboards

Purchased 20 years ago this month in a tiny Italian village surrounded by vineyards, these chunks of wood lasted longer than our marriage. But we’ll take one each, along with the memories, and gratitude for all that we were and all that we made.