Sunday, January 15, 2012

Once Upon a Name...





Let's start at the very beginning, shall we? (That's a very good place to start)

The first thing you see when you look at a book...the first opportunity for it to really grab your attention and make you pull it off the shelf...is the title. Imagine yourself looking down a long row of books in a store, and reaching for the one with the title on the spine that most intrigues you.

Well...we want, according to what we've already talked about on this blog, to make our homes like fairy tales...like story books. So what is the first step?

Name your home.

This may seem utterly silly if your home is an apartment in a basement, or a steel and glass city studio instead of a country cottage or beach house you might traditionally associate with the idea of house naming. But the simple process of naming your home makes it more of a living, breathing thing to you. It stops being where you hang your hat, and starts being where you cradle your heart.

Naming your own house has a long standing tradition in England. (Which just plain gives it bonus points in this Anglophile's heart) It started with the gentry naming the different buildings and properties on their land, and was usually tied to their family name. Ex: Mitford Manor, Mitford Cottage, Mitford Mill, etc. Other people followed, naming their homes for distinguishing features around their homes. Ex: Orchard House, Pine Cottage, etc.

Although it remains a popular choice in England today, it is by no means exclusive to them. In fact, the blog header you see at the top of this page? The cut page photographed in the center is a page from the classic book Little Women. The text describes an idyllic cottage home in which Meg and John spend their first years: Dovecote.

The plain fact of the matter is that naming your house affects you psychologically. This article in the British newspaper The Telegraph is proof of that. In the article, they encourage renaming a home to help affect its real estate value. If naming a home can affect how the buyer thinks of it, imagine what it can do for you in your opinion of your own abode! Here's another excellent and thorough site to guide you through the naming process.

This is the name plaque on my own front stoop. We chose this name for several reasons: the alliteration, the fact that our cat is well and truly the monarch of our household, and the fact that our house is located at the corner of two streets, around the corner from the highway, around the corner from where I work, and around another corner from our gym.


So please...even if it seems a little silly, name your house. I guarantee it will help you start thinking of it as something magical.

In fact, Guillermo del Toro agrees with me. At 4:30 in this video, he says "The day you start this ritual is a really great day: Name everything in your house. Name everything. You know, recognize your shoes as your shoes. Not 'the shoes.' Own and have a relationship with everything.."

10 comments:

  1. I"m going to be moving into an apartment soon after I leave my beloved Hummingbird Cottage and was interested in hearing more about how to reclaim an apartment with a name. What do you think?

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  2. Hi Wendy! The article on naming homes being an influence on their real estate value mentions that people with urban homes often will use names of famous architects or aristocrats. I dunno...I think even if you live in an urban area or an apartment, there's still definitely inspiration in the location. Look out the window, and what do you see? A beech tree? That could help the name. Even if there's no nature around the location, a quirk of the architecture could also help...Vaulted ceilings, or a tiny closet that seems to have no purpose. And if all else fails, naming the location for something entirely related to what you love can still help you associate it with fondness...Yeats Corner, or Froud Manor...

    Hope that helps! :)

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  3. Perfect Grace, thank you. I'm moving to New Mexico and there's certainly a lot of archetypes and imagery that would work perfectly! Thank you so much : )

    Btw, I LOVE your blogs, well both of them.

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  4. An old roommate and friend named our home The Burrow. I was terribly flattered and now I think I need a plaque outside naming it so for all to see.

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  5. Absolutely!! It makes me smile every time I see the plaque on the front of our house. :) And they aren't that hard to make with a template from Hobby Lobby or Michaels :)

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  6. I will be forever grateful that you helped me name Fiddlehouse. <3

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  7. It does fit it so well, doesn't it? :D

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  8. Can a name you tag your home with, even be added to the official postal address in the U.S.?
    Leigh

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  9. I'm not sure if you could do it officially, but you could certainly put it on all your address labels and such :)

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  10. Oh certainly! But it would be truely cool if it could be official, as well.
    Leigh

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