Homes are our personal designs for living

Home is where the heart is, the sentimentalists say. And where we choose to lay our hat, apocryphal as the saying is today, still speaks volumes about who we are and where our lives are going and have gone.

True, financial constraints can mean we do not get to live in a place we truly desire, or the residence we think we deserve. We may spend our days cooped up at the office, doing everything we can to keep away from our hole-in-the-wall abode.

Or we may be on a mission to give a wide, wide berth to noisy, inconsiderate neighbors who can make a living hell of even the most palatial of homes.

But our homes are benchmarks in our lives, important tags on the pages of our personal biographies. If our family and friends are the sturdy threads woven through our lives, our homes are the embellishment in the colorful tapestry.

For me, a childhood home in a suburb of Durban, South Africa, gave way to a larger house in a development on a former cherry orchard in Kent. Eventually, there was a semicolonial on a sleepy street in tony Ridgewood, New Jersey, and a condominium in the Garden District of sultry New Orleans, an oasis lying a few hundreds meters from a crime-riddled project on Magazine St.

And in between, during a year-long student exchange program, there was a sprawling mansion on a boulevard in Padang, West Sumatra, its architectural puzzle of skewed renovations and additions a testament to two families' desperate quest to keep up and ahead of the Jones' or, in this case, the Junaidis'.

But the happiest time of all was my senior year in college, spent in my own ivory tower of a two-bedroom apartment perched over Cunninghams pharmacy on Main St. in Grinnell, Iowa. For the princely sum of US$150 a month, I froze in the winter and sweltered in the boiling summers, but it was worth every penny to be away from the confines of a dormitory. It was my space, to be lived in, and shaped, and molded as I saw fit.

An old trunk, draped in a sarong purchased back in Malang, East Java, served as a makeshift table in the living room, where friends supped cheap wine and dipped into a fondue maker which had finally found a use. The bathtub -- tiny and cramped and with a tank which ran out of hot water after five minutes -- was my retreat to relax and reflect on the week ahead on cold, eerie, charmed Sunday nights.

Once you have made a home of your own, you can understand why people take such solicitous pride in theirs, why they will do their utmost to defend their property. For creating their home has made it part of them, literally of their design for living and for life.

Know a friend whose eyebrows arch plaintively whenever you pop open the Dunkin' Donuts carton and prepare to dig into a jelly- filled donut on his new cream-hued sofa? The spiteful temptation may be to put the worrywart in his place and discreetly let that raspberry filling dribble out in your own multicolored homage to the Rorshach test (let him analyze that, you sniff). Think again before you create this piece of food art; it could be a silly act of mischief to leave a friendship in mortal danger.

Just because you feel fine and dandy leaving your room looking like a hurricane blew in does not mean it is time to judge your neat-freak friend or start speculating if his mom was a tad too disciplined when it came to potty time. It is his space, it is to do with as he wishes, so it is your duty to respect him and tread carefully.

The most beautiful public home I have seen was Sissinghurst, formerly the abode of author Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson in Kent, with its sumptuously planned gardens displaying the best of the English countryside. Of course, it is no longer a private home but a National Trust Property. The busloads of camera-toting tourists traipsing through its nut and flower gardens and medieval tower no doubt have the inspiration for Virginia Woolf's Orlando turning in her grave. It is a romantic notion, and probably inaccurate, but one can imagine what a charmed existence it must have been during the dark, early days of World War II, when Sackville-West lived seemingly cut off from the world save for infrequent trips to cosmopolitan London.

And the most splendid private home I have seen in my relatively short life was the former residence of Tennessee Williams on Dumaine St. in New Orleans. A narrow, three-story row house on the fringes of the French Quarter, it had been beautifully renovated and decorated after the author of A Streetcar Named Desire and other melodramatic tomes of Southern life bit off more than he could chew with a Tylenol bottle cap. Williams' former houseboy, Sam, kept guard on a stoop at the front of the house, and there was a kidney-shaped pool bathed in flickering light from frangipani in the backyard. It showed how imagination and creativity can make a house into a home. (Bruce Emond)