One Woman’s Quest to Build the Perfect Nest
Is it possible that Egyptian cotton towels give off pheromones?
I ask because I find myself helplessly drawn to them as I walk through the aisles of my local housewares and linens store. I don’t just want them. I lust after them, so attracted to certain lush shades--that tan with a hint of pink--that I would rather other shoppers were not around.
And it’s not just the towels.
Plastic containers designed for under-bed storage seem to murmur seductively as I pass by.
In normal times I don’t devote a great deal of neural wiring to storage containers of any kind, even those that would so neatly solve the problem of what to do with those pesky duvet covers that may burst out of my overstuffed linen closet at any moment.
But these are not ordinary times. As surely as the rains come and the bare-root roses go in, winter has come to the Valley and that means a lot of us are in full-fledged nesting mode.
What happens is this: You’re inside one drizzly Saturday unable to jog around the block and so you look around your living room. Until now, you’ve been perfectly satisfied with your living room. But now you notice that the stuffing has begun to peek out of the arm of the love seat. And those lampshades. What were you thinking when you bought those beaded lampshades that were the rage a couple years ago? Suddenly, they look like something your third-grader made at Girl Scout camp.
I’m not positive, but I think the nesting impulse is something that mostly happens to women. It’s not that men don’t decorate. When they get divorced, for instance, they go to Ikea and buy a black leather sofa and royal blue accessories. I would love to see some government agency fund a study to see if there is in fact a link between testosterone and the buying of black leather sofas (a companion study might see if estrogen increases the likelihood of choosing chintz, something people with significant amounts of testosterone seem to really hate). My guess is that there is both a black leather sofa gene and a chintz gene--but I digress.
What made me think about all this was my recent urge to turn my house into something that would cause TV lifestyle guru Colin Cowie to become so envious that he threw away his color wheel and entered a monastery. To this end, I began haunting housewares stores. I couldn’t pass a Home Depot without going inside and lingering over the paint chips, looking for just the right shade of grayed terra cotta to repaint my front door. I developed an unprecedented interest in door knockers and fireplace screens. Don’t ask how much time I spent in Crate and Barrel, admiring wire wastebaskets that I would never buy because who wants to look at your own trash?
Whenever you go to one of these domestic fields of dreams you find other women with the same look in their eyes, the look of women on a quest.
At Linens ‘N Things in Northridge, I ran into a Granada Hills woman clutching a box of mothballs. A retired schoolteacher, who asked to be anonymous, she was looking for the ideal container for storing sweaters. It had to be made of natural fibers, she explained, although she was willing to tolerate a plastic window so she could see the contents from the outside.
“Convenience is the word for me,” she said.
Like virtually every woman I’ve ever known, she had strong views on sheets and towels, views that involved natural fibers and a kind of princess-and-the-pea appreciation of the primacy of comfort. She explained that she buys only all-cotton sheets. How long ago did she discover that unadulterated cotton sheets are one of life’s singular pleasures?
“Centuries,” she answered.
Moreover, she said, the thread count (the more threads per inch, the softer the sheet) has to be at least 230. Colorwise, her current favorites are peach and “a very frosty pink.” As for towels, only Egyptian cotton will do. As Cleopatra knew, “it’s softer.”
Articulating the principle that has made Martha Stewart the Bill Gates of the domestic revolution (one I predict will last far longer than the dot.com revolution), the Granada Hills woman said, “I think women want a lot that’s aesthetically pleasing around them.” We agreed that many women look to their homes and such simple pleasures as flowers as accessible, inexpensive sources of health in often stressful, fiscally constrained lives.
“You go shopping and you find people buying flowers like they buy groceries,” she said.
They’re the original Prozac, I agreed, and a lot cheaper at $7.99 a bunch.
The nesting lifestyle has made Martha’s linens and garden accessories a hit at Kmart, and it is fueling high-end enterprises as well. Look at Restoration Hardware. You can find handles for your kitchen cabinets at any discount hardware store. But the people ogling the pricey cabinet pulls at Restoration Hardware are dreaming about something more than opening their cabinet doors.
As instinctual as birds, they are looking for the object that will finish the perfect nest. Sometimes the artist uses not a brush or a chisel, but a cabinet pull in the shape of a nautilus shell.
Spotlight runs every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.
