What Will Make My Home Beautiful?
What is beauty? How do you define that which makes our base and
animal existence bearable? The Oxford English Dictionary has it as ‘a
combination of shape, colour and form that pleases the aesthetic senses’. The
online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, says largely the same thing using many, many
more words, loads of links and a clutch of random images. In Australia it’s a
large fish. For me though, the one thing that truly demonstrates beauty in
essence is the self-adhesive vinyl wall sticker.
The perception of beauty is thought to have arisen through
evolutionary necessity – if an environment looks right then it will probably
provide adequate food and shelter and if a person looks right then there is a
good chance that progeny arising from a union with that individual will be OK
too. By the same token, if a wall sticker looks right coming out of the tube
then it’s bound to look great above the sofa!
It is easy to see this instinct for beauty in the behaviour
of small children. A small child will always be drawn to those of fair aspect and
if you saw some of the people down at my local Asda you’d wonder why there
wasn’t a great deal more ‘running-away-and-screaming’. A smile from a beautiful
person will delight a small child and set them to picturesque gurgling almost
as much as a wall sticker. Almost, but not quite.
Beauty is also defined in ideas of proportion and symmetry.
Classical architects and renaissance revivalists like Palladio designed even
the tiniest part of a structure in strict accordance with proportions and ratios
like a + b over a equals a over b equals 1.61. No, I don’t know what that means
either but 1.61 is very close to my height in metres when I’m putting up a wall
sticker standing in a trench. Looks good doesn’t it?
Mankind has striven over the millennia to make his
environment as agreeable as possible. The cave paintings at Lascaux are thought
to have had spiritual significance for early modern man but might it not
equally be the case that he was just fed up with the sight of smoky limestone
as we ourselves have tired of textured plaster finishes? Might it not also be
the case that wall stickers are the pinnacle of this search for visual nirvana?
I think they are.
In the modern era traditional classical ideas of beauty have
often been rejected, mainly by sour looking people with moustaches when they
get cut off by their bourgeois parents for not doing something respectable in
the run-up to World War One. How old-fashioned this rejection of beauty seems
now when we have wall stickers to brighten up the sitting room and bedroom and
even the kitchen!
It is true that beyond the manmade environment the natural
world provides us with many wondrous sights to behold: Sunsets, sunrises, soaring
mountains, delicate blooms and kittens but you would have to have cloth eyes
not to appreciate a ripped off Banksy painting or a cartoon bunny wrought in
sturdy UV resistant sticky backed poly-vinyl.
So raise a glass (and then drink what’s in it and then have another) to
the summit of aesthetic perfection – Wall stickers! I thank you.
www.zazous.co.uk are online retailers of wall stickers, wallpaper
murals, furniture, lighting, contemporary vinyl flooring, tableware and
accessories for the modern home. Fashion-forward, highly individual designs
that create striking interiors.
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