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Home as Memory: Where Past Meets Future

In this moment of profound loss – as smoke lingers in the air from the Los Angeles fires, as homes in Gaza crumble under bombardment, as thousands across different corners of our world sift through the remnants of what once held their lives – I find myself contemplating the nature of home itself. What remains when the physical structure is gone? What persists in memory when our carefully curated spaces are reduced to rubble, to char and remnants? How do we carry the essence of home when displacement and destruction force us to leave everything behind?

Fadi Adwan, a university student, has kept the keys to his house in Gaza, which has been partially destroyed. For generations dating back to the Nakba, keys symbolize a shared hope to return home for Palestinians. Source: CNN World; Photo Credit: Fadi Adwan

The answer, I've come to believe, lies not in the objects themselves, but in the echoes they carry - those ineffable traces of consciousness that ripple through time, connecting us to moments and memories we can sense but never quite name.

Every home tells a story. Not just of who we are now, but of who we were, who we wish to become, and most importantly, who we carry within us. When my grandmother's brass kettle sits on an open kitchen shelf, it's not merely a vessel for tea – it's a vessel for memory, carrying within its worn patina the echo of conversations in another language, in another country, in another time. The kettle whispers of homeland even as it serves its purpose in my suburban American kitchen.

A thin place in brass: a vintage Pakistani tea kettle with carved wood handles, now whispers stories of another time, another home, as it sits on a brick shelf bridging our kitchen and family room.

Origins and Echoes

In our current moment, social media feeds overflow with perfectly styled interiors – rooms that speak of aspiration rather than memory, of future rather than past. These curated spaces tell stories too, but they are often stories of who we wish to be rather than who we are and have been. They reflect our culture's relentless focus on forward momentum, on newness, on the next thing. But what if we approached home design as an act of integration rather than aspiration? What if our spaces could hold both our dreams and our grief, our futures and our pasts?

I come to this exploration not as a designer, but as someone whose professional life is dedicated to leading research teams in pursuit of transformative ideas with societal impact. My days are filled with strategic planning, reducing barriers, and fostering innovation through collaborative science. Yet in the quiet moments between grant deadlines and team meetings, I find myself drawn to a different kind of inquiry – one that explores how interior spaces can evoke an imaginative consciousness that transcends time and place.

My own journey of home-making has been a series of migrations – from Ohio to Chicago's South Shore, where I lived in a 1909 Tudor in the historic Jackson Park Highlands, to a pre-war apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and back to Cincinnati. Each move has been more than a change of address; it's been a layering of memory, with each home carrying echoes of the ones before it. As a child of Pakistani immigrants, I carry within me other landscapes of home – the storied architecture of Lahore, the bustling streets of Faisalabad, the lush, green villages of Punjab. These memories live alongside my lived experiences of American spaces, creating an internal aesthetic that I rarely see reflected in the design shows I watch in stolen moments between work and family life.

History lived: A page from the City of Chicago’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks Designation Report. Our former Chicago home emerged from the drawing boards of Chatten & Hammond in 1909. Today, this historic district sits within Chicago's vibrant South Shore neighborhood—a storied community that has nurtured an extraordinary legacy of leadership and cultural impact, from Muhammad Ali and Michelle Obama to Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi and James Watson, from tech pioneer Larry Ellison to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, from artist Theaster Gates to the Nation of Islam's Mosque Maryam, and home to the South Shore Cultural Center, which remains one of Chicago’s most visually distinctive lakeside architectural gems.

Memory as Foundation

Now, as a mother of three teenage/tween children, I find myself wanting to create more than just a beautiful space. I want our home to be a vessel for inheritance – not of a particular design style, but of something more ethereal. I want my children to inherit a sense of beauty and placemaking that connects them to their multiple histories: their American present, their Pakistani heritage, their Muslim spirituality. I want them to understand how spaces can hold both the beautiful and difficult moments we carry, how they can bridge the tangible and the dreamed, how they can make room for both memory and becoming.

There is something sacred in these everyday objects that bridge worlds. Like a stainless steel pot carried over in a suitcase from Pakistan in the 1970s, the handle worn smooth by generations of hands, or a calligraphic Quranic verse that has blessed walls across continents, these pieces carry within them a kind of holy memory. They are physical manifestations of what Irish mystics call thin places – points where the veil between past and present, here and there, becomes transparent. When I light my antique Syrian candleholder, I'm not just illuminating my living room; I'm participating in a ritual that connects me to countless evenings in other homes, other times, other prayers.

A conversation across time and place: 1920s Syrian bronze candlesticks, found at a Cincinnati-based auction house, illuminate a handcrafted mother-of-pearl Quran from the West Bank—where generations of Palestinian artisans have transformed Red Sea oyster shells into luminous sacred art. Brought to Bethlehem by Franciscan monks from Damascus in the 15th century, mother-of-pearl craft flourished as pilgrims sought sacred souvenirs. The tradition continues today, passed down through generations of Palestinian artisans.

This space – this substack – is an exploration of home as memory, as inheritance, as future. It's about the objects we choose to surround ourselves with and how they become anchors not just in space, but in time. In an era of perfectly curated Instagram interiors and endless pressure to consume the newest, the trendiest, the most photogenic, I want to examine a different way of creating home. One that honors the scratches on inherited furniture, the mismatched vintage plates, the textiles that carry within their threads stories of distant marketplaces and ancestral hands.

In The Rock That Is Higher, Madeleine L'Engle speaks to this mysterious nature of home and memory:

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”

This fleeting sense of recognition, this glimpse of home in unexpected places, resonates deeply for those of us who straddle multiple cultures, whose sense of home is split across oceans and continents. Yet in this liminal space, we have the opportunity to create something otherworldly – homes that are not bound by a single tradition or timeline, but rather weave together threads from many sources into a tapestry that whispers of connections across time, place, and souls who have never met.

Creating Sacred Space

Consider the antique dining table, scarred and marked by decades of family meals. Each scratch tells a story – holiday gatherings in another family's home, children's homework sessions, late-night conversations over cups of tea. When we choose such pieces for our homes, we're not just making sustainable choices; we're becoming custodians of memory, adopting these stories into our own narrative. The Afghan tribal rug beneath it, found in a local auction, speaks of distant shepherds and weavers, their ancient patterns now continuing their journey in a new context.

An estate sale find: a pine writing desk marked by years of creative endeavor, begins its next chapter in my home office. Its newest admirer, our cat Lolo, seems to have been color-matched by fate—his ginger fur perfectly matches the desk’s worn patina.

When we choose vintage pieces, we're not just making environmentally conscious decisions or following a design trend. We're choosing to live with objects that carry the weight of time, that bear witness to other lives, other stories. That mid-century sideboard wasn't just designed to display our carefully chosen objects – it once held another family's photographs, letters, precious things. Its scratches and water rings are a kind of text, telling stories of celebrations and sorrows, of daily lives lived and lost.

By mixing these pieces with contemporary elements, we create spaces that resist the simplified narratives of both pure nostalgia and mere aspiration. Instead, we build environments that acknowledge the complexity of human experience – the way we carry grief alongside hope, tradition alongside innovation, memory alongside dreams of the future.

This is not about design for design's sake. It's about the profound human need to create spaces that reflect and contain our memories, our heritage, our hopes. When we choose a secondhand chair or hang our grandmother's embroidered pashmina on a couch, we're not just decorating – we're engaging in an act of storytelling, of preservation, of resistance against the disposable nature of modern consumer culture. We're creating what the ancient Romans called a genius loci – the spirit of place – that transcends mere aesthetics.

Each object in our homes can be a form of prayer, a way of honoring those who came before and those who will come after. The hand-thrown pottery bowl that holds fruit on our counter doesn't just serve a function; it connects us to the earth it came from, to the artisan who shaped it, to the traditions that informed its design. In choosing such pieces over mass-produced alternatives, we're making a statement about value, about time, about connection.

The Path Forward

In a world where conflict, climate change, and catastrophe increasingly displace people from their ancestral homes, the act of creating home becomes even more sacred. How do we carry our heritage with us when forced to flee? How do we honor the memories of homes lost to violence and disaster? How do we blend traditions in ways that honor both where we came from and where we are? The Palestinian grandmother's olive wood mortar and pestle saved from her kitchen, the Syrian refugee's copper coffee pot sitting beside a modern espresso machine, the Hmong story cloth hanging above a mid-century credenza – these juxtapositions tell stories of resilience, adaptation, and the persistent human need to create sanctuary even in the face of devastating loss.

The vintage Persian rug beneath a contemporary sofa isn't just an aesthetic choice – it's an acknowledgment of continuity amid disruption, of beauty that survives displacement, of traditions that adapt rather than disappear. The handmade ceramic bowls passed down through generations sitting alongside modern dinnerware speak to our capacity to integrate rather than replace, to build upon rather than discard.

An engraved silver bowl from Pakistan cradles Lake Michigan stones collected by my children; it shares space with a gifted Michael Aram copper piece and a vintage Indian brass goblet found in an antique store in Lebanon, Ohio —three metallic stories spanning continents and generations, at rest on a contemporary leather table.

This is an invitation to think deeply about the spaces we inhabit and the stories they tell. To consider how our homes can be not just shelters for our bodies, but sanctuaries for our memories, our traditions, our becoming. As Pascal Mercier observed in Night Train to Lisbon,

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

Yet perhaps even when return is impossible, the places and people we've left behind stay with us, finding new expression in the homes we create now.

Join me as we explore what it means to create homes that honor memory while embracing future, that celebrate heritage while welcoming change, that tell not just our stories, but the stories of all those who have shaped us. Together, we'll examine how thoughtful curation of our spaces – through vintage finds, sustainable choices, and meaningful objects – can create a sense of continuity in an increasingly fractured world. We'll explore how our design choices can help us process grief, honor memory, and still make space for joy and becoming.

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