Chinmayee Manjunath

We moved homes earlier this year, for the fifth time in our ten-year marriage, and this time, making it ours felt much more meaningful. As a subconscious rule, we tend to start fiddling about with furniture, tchotchkes and art, etc, after a month or two of living in that house. It’s impossible to know what to do with the space until we begin to understand our relationship with every part of it.

Until you’ve lived in a house for some time, you never know what its advantages and disadvantages are – what will you actually do with that oddly-shaped corner in the living room, or how can you make the corridor look pretty and be useful? Maybe some people have these answers early on in the process but we never do.

The house we now live in came to us in pretty good shape, and with much added to it by the owner, who had lived here himself. What we had to do is make it our own, and this time around, we really put a lot of thought into it from the beginning. I think it’s also part of growing older, and feeling more rooted in yourself, your relationship, and your place in the world.

We’ve each now lived in Bombay for over a decade, and have our individual and collective bonds with the city, and our neighbourhood. How we each relate to space, and how we use it is also so much clearer to us. Everything has to fall into a rhythm, tangibly or not, when you start making a house a home.

While I constantly find myself tinkering around, moving small objects here and there, or adding to what we own, my husband has a more laidback and functional approach to it all. He likes to think things through, make some changes or additions, and then leave it be for a while. Creating a balance between these two quite-opposite attitudes has taken time, patience, and a lot of compromise, but it’s all worth it in the end.

When I walk around this house now, four months after we moved in, I find that it’s beginning to tell our stories in a truly authentic, but subtle manner. More than that, there’s a sense of calm to it that I think can be traced to our evolving definition of ourselves, and of home as a space that reflects the people we are, not the people we want to be seen as.