Andrée Putman and the Room That Knows When to Stop

There’s a photograph of Andrée Putman’s Paris apartment that I keep coming back to. Not because it’s styled, but because it isn’t. A bed, a lamp at exactly the right height, a chair by Mies van der Rohe that she put there when she was fifteen years old, having cleared her bedroom of everything else she considered unnecessary. She was fifteen, and most of us are still acquiring things we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to get rid of.

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