Homemaking

What is home? And how do we choose to make one? There are many answers to these questions, as the conditions of home are not only personal but also cultural, circumstantial and economic. For some, home is where they sleep; for others, it’s where they feel them­selves, which might not necessarily be in their apartment or house. The stories in this issue get at the expansive notion of home — its aesthetic pleasures, its secrets, its necessity. Photographer Catherine Opie shares the object she cherishes the most in her home and, even, the world: a beautiful designer chair that perfectly molds to her body. Domestic objects with real design can transform your living experience, and artist Bailey Hikawa extends this philosophy down to your toilet seat. At home, there is “the sanctity of Inside,” as Mariam Rahmani explains in her essay on the value and luxury of dressing up to stay in.

Making a home in an expensive city like L.A. can be challenging. For some, it means perpetual renting and moving, though there is beauty to be found in this impermanence, as Diana Ruzova writes in her intimate essay about growing up as an apartment manager’s daughter. We can make home out of the very fabric of a city, gradually collecting places and street corners until they feel like our own. For Julissa James, it’s the laundromat, a haven that has become her “comfort zone” — her “own private version of the club, where fluorescent light floods from the ceiling and there’s always Amy Winehouse or Salt­N­Pepa playing over the loudspeaker.” If we’re lucky, we become the designers and architects of our own lives, a role that Aleali May has fully assumed. In this issue’s cover story, May gets real about her design ambitions and shares her latest sparkling creations within the iconic setting of a quintessential modernist home, the Sheats­Goldstein house. The 1960s house has long been admired by the fashion crowd, architects and artists, including Opie. (When she realized she’d never live in such a space, Opie made a film imagining that she set the property on fire. Luckily for us, it still stands.)

L.A., perhaps more than most cities, is many things at once — “an enigma of contradic­tions,” as Gotha Shakira puts it in her horoscope of the month — and so it’s unsurprising that there are so many ways to make and define home. But in Gemini spirit, we don’t need to settle on one definition. We can change our minds and reinvent it. We can live in many places at once.

Elisa Wouk Almino
Deputy Editor

Image logo by Beatriz Lozano For The Times