Hitting Home
A fellow voyeur uncovers the truth about domestic decorating bliss

IF YOU'RE reading this, you're probably a committed house voyeur.

You know who you are. The one who snatches up those pricey "shelter" magazines as soon as they hit the newsstand. The one who enjoys peeking (so to speak) under the Egyptian-cotton Frette sheets of the rich and famous.

But face it, every addiction has its price.

If you're hooked on such stories, you've probably come to at least one of the following conclusions: The couples profiled (and they are most always couples, often without kids) apparently agree 100 percent of the time, have unlimited funds and own no extraneous junk. More to the point, no one in these stories ever spends the night on a lumpy futon after a particularly testy home-improvement conversation.

To put it bluntly, your life is a mess by comparison.

Fellow voyeurs, I am here to tell you it is not so — no matter what (we) writers say.

Consider my own story: Two years ago, my husband and I got married. We both sold our respective houses and bought one to share. We then took on the task of combining the goods of two opinionated 50-somethings, both of whom had been single for years. Fortunately, we bought a place that didn't need work. All we had to do was decide on a few new pieces of furniture, hang art, combine books, choose wall color and figure out how much of our "old stuff" would go to his grown kids.

I'll spare you the details except to say my husband (who, to make matters worse, is an architect) now likens the process to a train wreck. How could this have happened? We have similar tastes. Our books have similar titles. We love each other, for goodness sake. How was I to know he was comfortable only when the handles on each and every Illy espresso cup were turned in the same direction at exactly the same angle? How was he to know I was plotting the eventual demise of his Prague chairs? Had we really chosen to ignore this before we tied the mortgage knot?

All things considered, you would think we'd know better.

During those first months, I forgot everything I'd ever seen or heard in my house-writing career: the less-than-loving exchanges between partners, the tense moments between clients and architect, between architect and contractor, between contractor and everyone else involved in the house-making process. I was convinced we were alone in our decorative dysfunction.

Thankfully, reality intruded.

While on a trip to Montreal, my husband and I went to an intimate French bistro for dinner. Soon, it became clear the "mid-life" couple seated next to us was in the process of planning their first "shared" home. Yes, we eavesdropped.

"Oh, sweetie," she said, "don't you think my bookcase would look great against the back wall?"

"Oh, yes," he replied, tenderly taking her hand. "And what if we paint that wall soft red?"

I couldn't let it pass.

"Listen to that," I whispered to my husband. "Why can't we make house decisions so calmly?" My mate made no comment and continued to cut his filet. Several minutes later, the foie gras hit the fan. "What! You think we're going to spend that amount of money for a rug?" the man said, his voice rising like a soprano's in rehearsal.

"I can't believe you're questioning my right to spend my money," she said, responding in kind. Minutes later, she fled to the bathroom in tears, he went to the smoking lounge for a break and the waiter hastily tidied up the table.

Fellow voyeurs, it was a very bad scene.

"You know," said my man, with one of his inscrutable smiles, "the first thing that crossed my mind when they started talking was how many of our house conversations start out that calm." OK, it's slightly demented, but we felt better. Still, evidently humbled by that anonymous exchange, we made more decisions over the next week than we'd made in months.

But then I felt an entirely new emotion: Guilt. Over the years of writing about house relationships, how much damage had I caused by not alluding to the true cost of attaining perfection? Then and there, I decided to make up for this grave error by presenting the not-necessarily-for-publication strategies of folks (almost) like you. Here we go:

Strategy No. 1: Never co-habitate with someone who has a strong opinion about how a house should look, especially if his or her ideas in any way conflict with yours.

No. 2: If you can afford it, hire an interior designer. Not only will the place look great, the project will actually get finished.

No. 3: Find a partner who is outrageously proud of your interior design talents (or the talents of your interior designer). If that person has no opinion on the merits of chintz verses modernism and is willing to cheerfully pay the bills with no regard to cost, so much the better. Yes, this really happens.

No. 4: Find somebody extremely rational with extraordinary good taste who thinks exactly like you do. (This happens, too.)

And finally: Remember that domestic narratives are meant to focus on the joy of the outcome, not on the hair-raising tales of the journey. After all, it's like childbirth: Supposedly, one forgets the pain in the afterglow. Of course, underneath it all lies the ultimate voyeuristic fact: "Their" lives, their house relationships, are for the most part as imperfectly perfect as yours.

But perhaps you don't want to know that. Perhaps the joy of home voyeurism is not in attaining perfection, but in continuing to aspire.

I know just how you feel.

Victoria Medgyesi writes about architecture and lifestyle trends. Paul Schmid is a Seattle Times news artist.