ABSTRACT
We have examined how people turn their houses readily into museums or personal theme parks (Chapter 57), but what happens when 'stuff' is imposed upon you and takes over your house? The Chicago study twenty years ago looked at people's attachment to particular household objects (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981). As the article states, however, 'the details of domestic union are much more trying for a mature coupie, especially if one of the pair carries over objects from a previous marriage or cohabitation.' Collecting is not simply about creating a collection of a certain object: domestically, it can also be about the very chairs we sit on, or plates we eat from. We have seen in Chapter 26 how we often subconsciously assign domestic things their own pi ace, even in the kitchen; what if our world is suddenly 'invaded' by the belongings of another, albeit a relative in this case? How would we respond? Would we feel uncomfortable, as though the belongings and their owner were an all pervasive presence, dominating or subjugating our own? Certainly, this is the feeling here.
