On Old Houses and Candlelight

There’s something about old houses that modern homes can never quite replicate.

Not just the architecture or the creaking floors, but the feeling that life has already unfolded within them for generations.

I was in a store today filled with old French garden urns, weathered terracotta pots, antique candlesticks and pieces worn soft by time. The kind of objects that carry their age quietly. And it made me think about our own house.

My children often complain that we live in an old home. Built in 1915, it has certainly had its colder years, though not so much anymore. But what I love about this house has very little to do with perfection. I love it because it has lived.

When this house was first built there was no electricity. No flushing toilet. There would have been an outhouse somewhere beyond the back door and candlelight flickering through these rooms long before modern life arrived. Since then the house has stood through earthquakes, floods, wars, recessions, pandemics and generations of ordinary family life in between.

Even the timber itself carries a history. Much of the house is built from native rimu.  Trees that may already have been centuries old before they were felled and milled. Their story did not begin as a house. They stood through storms and seasons long before these walls were built.

I think perhaps that is why I’m drawn to objects that feel enduring. Not perfect, not disposable, but things that seem to carry a sense of time within them. Candles, old pottery, worn wood, heavy linen, garden urns softened by weather. Objects that ask us to slow down enough to notice them.