BrocanteHome Values, Twenty-One Years Later

Welcome to The Archives: a gathering-up of twenty-one years of BrocanteHome: old essays, forgotten ideas and the small domestic philosophies that have been quietly waiting to be rediscovered. I’ll be returning to these pieces not simply to republish them, but to reconsider, annotate and occasionally argue with the woman who wrote them, asking what still feels true, what has changed and what deserves carrying forward.

We begin where all good revivals should: with our foundations, in BrocanteHome Values, Twenty-One Years Later…

In January 2005, when BrocanteHome was barely six weeks old and Finn, little more than one, I snuggled up on my red velvet sofa and wrote a manifesto.

I called it BrocanteHome Values, which sounds improbably grand for something written by an exhausted woman with a mad babba, an unreliable grasp on the housework and absolutely no idea that she was building a body of work she would still be wrestling with twenty-one years later.

There were six values.

• Have integrity.

• Seek authenticity.

• Put order before beauty, but make beauty your reason for being.

• Think and act locally.

• Don’t pretend you are Superwoman.

• Get up early.

And while some of them still make me want to stand on a chair and cheer (and slightly cringe) others make me smile at the woman I was. And if I’m honest, one or two make me want to take yesterday-me gently by the shoulders and send her back to bed.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know then, but even so, beneath the (scrumptious 😘) language of vintage housekeeping, there was a tickle of the truth: Our lives are supposed to feel like our own. To belong to us. And we are entitled to shape them anyway we want them.

Home should support that life. Beauty should not be reserved for best. Domesticity mustn’t our disappearance. And the ordinary (oh the blessed ordinary!) deserves our attention because the ordinary is where most of our life happens.

I hadn’t yet found all the words. I had no understanding of my neurodivergence, no experience of blasted menopause and none of the clear-eyed impatience that arrives when a woman realises she has spent far too long trying to become somebody more manageable.

(I’m never going to be manageable)

But I had the beginning of the truth.

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So here they are again. BrocanteHome values, twenty-one years later.

1. Have integrity

In the original manifesto, I told the story of a mummy who put enormous effort into her little boy’s first birthday party, only to be told by another woman that she had “obviously got nothing better to do.”

She went home and wondered whether she had done too much. Whether her pleasure in celebration had embarrassed other people. Whether she should have made herself smaller so nobody else had to feel inadequate.

It was me. I was the Mummy who tried too hard.

Back then, I believed integrity meant refusing to apologise for caring. I still do.

For there will always be somebody ready to sneer at the things women love: Caring about the home is trivial. Making things beautiful is vanity. Creating rituals is indulgent. Dressing the Christmas table is showing off. Wanting a softer life means you are not paying proper attention to the hard things.

It is exhausting nonsense. All of it! It was then and it is now.

Integrity is doing what feels true even when it does not earn the right kind of applause. Even when it shames those who haven’t he same incliation so they lash out. Integrity is refusing to pretend you don’t care when you do. And it is also refusing to perform enthusiasm for a life that is making you miserable.

Thank heavens then, that I understand something now that simply didn’t enter my head when I was so committed to playing house at the age of thirty-two, while apologising left, right and centre for it: integrity isn’t stubbornly remaining the woman you declared yourself to be. It is allowing yourself to change without calling that change failure.

Because sometimes integrity means carrying on…

And sometimes it means admitting that the ritual has become a burden, the dream no longer fits or the room you worked so hard to create has become somewhere you cannot breathe.

We are allowed to alter the terms. And now I understand we only have to keep what still feels alive, and can release all that asks us to betray ourselves in the name of domesticity, womanhood and family.

Don’t confuse consistency with truth, will you?

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2. Seek authenticity, but don’t turn it into another performance?

In 2005, I wrote that authenticity was “a never-ending path to becoming who we really are.”

I was right about the never-ending part.

But I’m less certain now that there is one finished, authentic self waiting beneath the clutter. I don’t think we can excavate our way towards one perfect version of ourselves who has, apparently been there all along, sitting cross-legged under twenty years of obligation and wondering what took us so long.

We are more complicated than that.

We are a house full of women. The careful one. The vulgar one. The frightened one. The woman who wants to be left alone. The one who longs to be witnessed. The domestic creature, the ambitious creature, the sensual creature and the strange girl who has been collecting scraps of paper since childhood…

Authenticity does not require us to choose between them. Instead it asks us to stop locking certain women in the attic because their appetites, anger or glorious oddness might make visitors uncomfortable…

This is particularly important in midlife, when the performance of being fine becomes intolerable. Menopause loosens the wallpaper. Grief shifts the furniture. Children grow, relationships change, bodies insist on being acknowledged and the selves we edited out begin rattling the door handles.

Let them in. Or let them OUT.

Authenticity is never about becoming presentable. But always, always about choosing to learn how to live with yourself as you really are.

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3. Put order before beauty, except when beauty is the only thing keeping you going…

This was the value I repeated most often.

“Beauty does not exist in chaos,” I wrote, with the confidence of a woman who had’t fully grasped how very close she was to the edge of domestic insanity.

I thought we had to deal with the dross before we earned the pleasure. Clean the room, then arrange the flowers. Finish the ironing, then read the book. Put the house in order, then begin living…

But I don’t believe that anymore.

Order is useful. It can quiet the mind, lower the domestic temperature and make ordinary life easier. There’s no doubt that is real calm in finding a clean cup when you need one. Comfort in fresh sheets and relief in knowing where the passports live.

But order isn’t moral achievement, and beauty is not in itself reward.

You see sometimes the house is chaotic because she who is living in it is overwhelmed, grieving, ill, neurodivergent, busy surviving or simply more interested in something else. Withholding beauty until she has achieved order is just another way of telling her she has not yet earned tenderness.

And we ALL deserve tendersness…

So put the flowers on the cluttered table. Let them live among the mess.

Light the candle in the messy kitchen. Dim the lights on the dishes.

Wear perfume while looking for the electricity bill. Woman first above all else.

Make one corner lovely and sit inside it for ten minutes. Breathe.

Because beauty is not the icing on the domestic cake: sometimes it is the emergency ration. The saving grace. The only moment worth having in a day that tastes terrible.

A beautiful life can be disordered, but it’s time we acknowledge too, that a tidy life can be desperately sad. The point is not to achieve either perfection or picturesque chaos, but to notice what your home is asking of you today.

Perhaps it does need a thorough (slow) scrub? A little Edith Piaf. Or a glass of wine.

Or maybe you need to shut the door on the whole unruly business and go back to bed with the Scent of Water.

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4. Think locally, live attentively

In 2005, I urged readers to support small shops, use local businesses and resist the anaesthetic convenience of the shopping centre.

I still believe in much of that. I love the eccentric shop, the independent bookseller, the market stall and the woman making beautiful things at her kitchen table. Local businesses give places texture. Without them, every town becomes the same grey corridor of betting shops, takeaway menus and empty windows.

But life is not a charming illustrated high street.

Sometimes the independent shop is too expensive. Sometimes disability, anxiety, exhaustion or geography makes online shopping essential. Sometimes Amazon is not an ethical failure but the only reason there is cat food in the cupboard and shampoo in the bathroom.

Let’s not turn accessibility into sin?

To live locally now means paying attention to where we are. Knowing the names of our neighbours if we can. Noticing what is disappearing. Using what is available before chasing something more photogenic. Understanding that community is not an aesthetic and belonging cannot be purchased in a farm shop.

It also means recognising that home is not always one fixed patch of earth.

That it can be rented, temporary, shared, precarious or moving slowly along a canal. We can belong to a place without owning it. We can care for a room that is not ours forever.

The BrocanteHome principle is not simply shop locally. It is live attentively.

Know where you are. Notice what sustains you. Contribute when you can. Don’t allow convenience to make the world invisible.

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5. Don’t pretend you are Superwoman

Righty-ho: at last, a value that has survived almost entirely intact.

I wrote then that BrocanteHome was not about being Martha Stewart, stuffing mushrooms or cleaning the loo at midnight. It was not about perfectionism or killing ourselves in pursuit of domestic goddesshood.

Apparently I knew what I was talking about. I simply had difficulty applying it to myself: for years I built systems, abandoned them, designed better systems and then felt astonished when I abandoned those too. I made routines for the woman I believed I ought to be and regarded the woman I actually was as an awkward employee refusing to follow instructions.

Now I know more. About myself and about how women like me can create lifes that feel less like constat compromise and abject failure.

I know that a neurodivergent mind can adore order while being spectacularly unable to maintain it. I know that domestic competence fluctuates. I know that a woman can create something beautiful while there are dishes growing their own civilisation in the kitchen.

Superwoman is not coming. And thank-god for that because she was not only exhauting, she was usually all sorts of boring too.

In her place is the gloriously messy woman. She is capable, inconsistent and often carrying too much. She loses her phone while talking on it. She creates elaborate plans and then wanders away from them because she has fallen down a rabbit hole of her own choosing and only excellent cheese will talk her outt of it.

She is not a failed version of the woman she ought to be: she is the woman.

So my BrocanteHome must always be gentle enough to hold her. Not by endlessly excusing what is making her unhappy, but by helping her begin without shame. One surface. One promise. One tiny return to herself.

No medals. No domestic sainthood. No pretending.

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6. Keep some time that belongs only to you

The original sixth value was Get Up Early.

Yeah. No. Only, if the spirit moves you ok?

I know what I meant? I had a very demanding, neurodivergent, often poorly little babba and very little of the solitude I yearned for, so I recommended rising an hour before everybody else to claim some private time. In the madess of early mummyhood I even calculated that an extra waking hour each day amounted to a fortnight every year!

(Something I now consider mathematically impressive and spiritually unhinged).

Exhausted women do not need to be told that sleep is stealing their lives!

I think what I wanted to protect was not early rising, it was sovereignty. Because doesn’t every woman need some time in which she is not performing a role or answering a need. Time when nobody is calling her Mum, asking what is for dinner, waiting for a reply or requiring her to make something happen.

It doesn’t have to be an hour. It doesn’t have to be productive. And it certainly doesn’t have to happen at five in the morning while she drinks something wholesome and writes in a leather-bound journal.

It can be twenty minutes in the car, sitting outtside the supermarket.

An afternoon in bed. A solitary lunch. A locked bathroom door. A walk down the lane. Half an hour spent reading about something wonderfully irrelevant.

The point is not what she does with the time, it’s that it belongs to only her.

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7. Make the ordinary beautiful

This was not one of the original six values, yet it was hidden inside all of them.

It may be the truest thing BrocanteHome has ever said…

Most of life does not happen on the longed-for day when the house is finished, the body is transformed, the business is thriving and the future has finally arranged itself to our satisfaction.

It happens NOW.

While the ironing pile wilts. While the roof leaks. While we are packing boxes, losing keys, making plans and changing our minds. It happens in the middle of uncertainty, with the wrong curtains and a bruise on the apple.

To make the ordinary beautiful is not to decorate over reality: It is to live inside it more fully.

It is gathering tiny evidence that the day was not entirely lost. Writing down the sentence that struck you. Wiping the coaster on the bedside table. Eating something sustaining from the plate you usually save for Christmas.

Beauty doesn’t deny difficulty.

It gives us somewhere to stand while difficulty passes through.

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Our values now

So here they are, distilled for the woman I am and the women BrocanteHome serves today:

• Have integrity, but allow yourself to change.

• Welcome the whole house full of women you contain.

• Use order as support, never as proof of goodness.

• Offer yourself beauty before you believe you have earned it.

• Live attentively in the place where you are.

• Stop auditioning for Superwoman.

• Keep some portion of your life entirely your own.

• Make the ordinary beautiful because the ordinary is your life.

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote that BrocanteHome was about creating a sanctuary where no one else, but you and yours mattered.

But I want to change that now?

Because other people do matter. The world matters. Politics, money, bodies, work and grief follow us through the front door. Sanctuary cannot mean looking away.

It means creating somewhere we can return to ourselves, so we are strong enough to look outward again. Putting ourselves first, so we have the strength to let everything else matter too.

Because home is not where life ends. It is where we begin again, and again and again. Woman first, above all else.