It's a small world after all

Maison et Object, the large home furnishings and decor fair held bi-annually in Paris just wrapped up this week. I was reading their rather large report on the fair and found the following paragraph:
"The Home, a collective passion
The world has changed in ten years. So have our ways of being and living. And so have our desires. For the past 10 years, MAISON&OBJET has reflected sociological and cultural changes that structure the homeware and object market. From year to year, from session to session, this homeware exhibition anticipates, decodes and stages the
emergence of new consumer behaviour. 1995-2005. It has been a decade since the home became one of the central values of our society. People talk about the "stay-at-home revolution". Against the storms of life, the living area, a location injected with strong emotion, has become a place of replenishment and self-development. The size of homes has increased together with a concern to increase their comfort. With the nineties, new needs appeared – the need for recognition, personal fulfilment, the need to give meaning and pleasure to life. A new vocabulary arrived: "cocooning", now replaced by "nesting". Whether a cocoon or a nest, the home harbours our dreams of happiness and shelters our desires for wellbeing. In the hit parade of factors providing individual happiness identified in 2002 by Cetelem, the home is easily the leader with 63%, way ahead of work (59%) and leisure (48%). 99% of French people believe that living in a warm home represents everyday well-being, according to the Domoscope observatory of the Unilever group. The rise in virtualisation makes the tangible place of the home even more touching. In a destabilised world where references are waning, the home continues to reassure us."

Given the recent tensions between France and the U.S., it's nice to know that we are more alike than we are different. That a basic love, such as that of home and hearth, transcends geography and culture, and gives us a common ground on which to mend our fences (do they really make for better neighbors?).

to read the entire Maison et Object report...
©2005 Linda Merrill, Chameleon Interiors