Is less more?

In the quest to cultivate a calm and tranquil home, we have found that minimalism doesn't do it for everyone.

A quote from William Morris, says `Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. While once this message was a self-help project or matter of taste, now it is a branding exercise, a promise of calm. A shorthand for the life that could be led, a clean slate. Instinctively, I shiver at the mention of minimalism. Rather than serene and meditative, the vision of a minimalist home has always suggested to me a life lived in fear, both of spills and of getting things wrong. There is the sense that this is not just the most tasteful way to live, but also the most morally superior - the sign of a balanced mind and ethical wallet, conscious and conscientious and simply better than you. I walk into white spaces and feel suspicious, as if entering a crime scene. 'What are they hiding?' I mutter. 'Where are the bodies? My trusty cynicism is sparked by the idea that minimalism can be bought, and by the illusion that through purchasing such emptiness - a single perfect teacup, a white paper lampshade - one can control the rest of one's life.

What about the messy feelings, smudged memories, tricky relationships that we have with food, drink, things... It is possible, of course, that I am wrong. That my criticism of minimalism is actually a criticism of myself. That in undermining the idea of it, I'm allowing myself another day without having to consider why, for example, I give into a nightly impulse to buy yet more folk art on Ebay. It is possible. It's possible that, though I hoarsely insist that a messy desk encourages a creative mind, I might get more done with said mind if, for instance, I could find my blue notebook. It's possible that, though my tastes lean heavily towards thousands of pot plants and 80s lamps, a home with fewer things might help me become calmer, less acquisitive, more respectful of light and space, serene.

In moments of great want, when a journey to the charity shop or stores of Instagram has pricked a desire in me, it's possible that I might find equal satisfaction walking away from a useful and/or beautiful object as I would from adding it to one of my many `collections'. But the idea, well, it stabs a little. marvel at her linens. I can dream of a life of contemplation containing only objects of wellness, but were I actually to achieve it I know I'd be paddling furiously under the surface to uphold the illusion of calm. In truth, I'm somewhere in the middle of those versions of me, with nothing in my house that I do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, or might come in handy one day, or quite like because it has fish on it. Peace comes, I'm realising, not by simply emptying your home, but by emptying your ideas of what serenity should look like.