How Home Design Kept Me Sane in Lockdown This Year
While finding solace in design projects, one writer remembers just how lucky she is to feel safe at all.
By
Gabriella Fuller
Illustration: Angie Wang
The day after New York City shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched people fight over the last roll of toilet paper at a deli, and a guy I met on a dating app offered me his only bottle of hand sanitizer. After that, I didn’t leave the house. Our homes became our refuges—and our panic rooms. Designing my own escape within became a priority: I repainted my closets; I covered my kitchen in white laminate; I reupholstered my sofa in a thick sunflower-colored cotton that my grandmother left behind when she moved to Florida, where she was now in a nursing home no one was allowed to enter. I sewed pillows in chartreuse velvet and painted large abstract canvases in jewel tones. I waited for seven o’clock, when the city came alive for a few minutes to cheer frontline workers, and we briefly felt less alone. When you live by yourself, as I did then, that sense of unity is especially beguiling.