junk drawer or wonder cabinet?

The room of wonder

There's that original German idea of the Wunderkammer, the room of wonder, and it's the clearest picture we know of what a maximalist home is for. The cabinet was never a box. In English, a cabinet meant a room long before it meant a piece of furniture. The room was the cabinet, a whole world built to be walked into.

In 1600s Europe, building one was the fashion. One of the most famous belonged to Ole Worm (1588–1654), a Danish physician and professor in Copenhagen. Around 1620 he began filling his with what he brought home from his travels: mostly rocks and living things, plus objects people had made. Fish and birds were suspended overhead, and so was a young polar bear. After he died, his son published the full catalog in 1655 as Museum Wormianum, and the collection went on to become part of the foundation of Denmark's National Museum.

Here at team Saéa, this is what a maximalist environment means for us. We obsess over showing how time and artifacts can be assembled into a space to evoke intentional wonder.

A pile isn't a cabinet

Maximalism isn't just being a collector, or vibes across time, smashing it all together in a visual assault of the senses. I mean, it can be that. That's fun. But what does that do for you?

For Worm, the room thought alongside him. With his specimens in reach, he showed that lemmings were rodents, not creatures that formed out of thin air, and he set down some of the first evidence gathered the way scientists gather it now that unicorns weren't real. His room was built to make him think, and it did.

A wonder space does something for the person living in it.

Everything you choose is an ally to that. Forces you assemble to articulate and establish your time zone. Your own sovereign state of play. I mean, have you ever thought of your living room, kitchen, bedroom, or even your garage as a must-experience destination that someone might book their next vacation around? Why not?

One room, one job

James Clear makes the case for this in Atomic Habits (2018). We tie our habits to the places they happen, he writes, so when one space hosts everything, the cues blur together and the easiest habit wins. His rule is "one space, one use."

We'd take it a step further. Don't eat in the living room. Don't bathe in the office. Each space does one thing, and that thing can be a mood as much as a task. One room is for thinking. One is for slowing the day down. One is for loud dinners that run past midnight. Once you know what a room is for, you know what belongs in it.

Allies tend to be small and specific:

• The rock you picked up on a walk and never set down.
• The cookbook with someone else's handwriting in the margins.
• The bowl that's moved through four apartments with you.
• The mug a friend threw on a wheel, a little crooked, that you reach for first.

As Shezal puts it, "A home you walk into and can't immediately say, oh, this is art deco, or this is mid-century modern." A room of wonder answers to the person, not to a style.

Your own cabinet

So we take the stance that your shelves and the rooms they sit within are a cabinet you're still filling. It's the opposite of a room that could belong to anyone.

Here's a way in. Pick one room and name the one thing it's for. Then walk it slowly and ask every object the same question: are you helping this room do its job? The things that say yes stay out where you can see them. The things that don't can go live in the drawer. The drawer has room.

You don't need a polar bear. You need a few things on your side.