By the time I turned 17, my family had moved nine times. Every few years, our possessions would be packed into moving vans or U-Hauls and driven cross-country — south to north, east to west — or loaded onto a boat for Hawaii, where we returned again and again.
Because of that, I’ve always defined home not as a physical space but as the things that fill it. I would know we were home when my mother had unpacked the inexpensive ceramic ramen bowls that she and my father had bought before I was born; when the 19th-century Korean rosewood chest with its mother-of-pearl inlay had been positioned in the living room; when the willow branch baskets my father wove when I was 6 had been placed atop the corner cupboard. Then there were my parents’ collections of books and Japanese and German prints, American quilts and vintage fabrics, petrified stones and hunks of coral. Curiously, in all those moves, nothing ever seemed to disappear — each time, whatever space we occupied, be it roomy or cozy, seemed to accommodate everything we had.
So it’s perhaps no wonder I have a special affinity for the houses featured in this issue. All of their owners are unabashed collectors, all of them take delight in objects and all of them find value in integrating their dwellings’ past lives and occupants into their present. Sometimes, as in the case of the Cairo-based architecture professor and preservationist Alaa el-Habashi and his engineer wife, Ola Said, it meant resurrecting a once-treasured historical element (here, a ruined ceiling decoration); other times, as in the creative director Ramdane Touhami and the beauty executive Victoire de Taillac-Touhami’s Haussmann-era mansion in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement, it meant honoring those formerly associated with the building by literally enshrining their names in plaster in a frieze that wraps around the top of the dining room walls.
But the house — and owner — I relate to most is the Lake Como residence of the former textile designer Giorgio Taroni, which is stuffed from floors to rafters with collections: oil paintings of the environs; ceramic parrots; old manuscripts; ephemera; 18th-century watercolors; and, best of all, more than 30,000 mounted stag beetles. The palazzo is a museum of its owner’s many fascinations, and the things within it — collections too fragile or vast to ever be moved — an announcement of ownership just as much as his name on the deed. “When I took over this place from my father in the ’70s,” Taroni says, “it was gloomy, very ‘Addams Family.’ I needed it to come alive.” That it did — a home needs objects but, moreover, it needs personality. Otherwise, it’s just brick and wood and plaster; it’s the occupant who gives it life.
