At home with Jenny Job
Styling a lifetimes worth of treasures with a little bit of help
Styling a lifetimes worth of treasures with a little bit of help
On the 5th of September Jenny had her first meeting with Anna and Tara from Impressions Property Styling. She walked them through her house and told them stories of all her treasured items. Art she picked up in Thailand titled “the love dance,” and a puppet hanging on the wall from Bangkok. Jenny’s home is full of the most unique and personal collection of decor and memories you will ever see. Now, settled in Australia after years of postings in Thailand, Bangkok, South Africa, and a handful of other countries, Jenny and husband, Peter, called in some back up to help them organise and style their lifetime of memories.
Tara first mentioned Jenny to me on a Monday morning, she was the first ‘Styled to Stay by Impressions’ client that Tara and Anna had worked with and they got along like a house on fire. “Her house is lived in, it’s a home,” Anna told me later as we discussed Jenny’s newly styled home. Being welcomed into her house that is exactly how it felt; like a home.
As Jenny led Tara and I through her home I was inspired, not just by the unique style of her home that Anna and Tara had created, but by the stories she told for each and every item. Jenny has spent so much of her life on postings, yet she never missed a beat when recounting the history of an item, never getting its lineage confused.
A loud boom bellowed out suddenly as Jenny whacked the gong that sat in her entry way. “While I was purchasing it one of the men took the handle away,” Jenny picked up and inspected the item as she told me how in the few minutes it took to pay he returned with the handle, “he had carved it right then and there, and oh he looked so happy with himself.” Near the gong, on the oposite side of the entry, an extravagant necklace hung framed on the wall. Her good friend Ralph, Jenny told me, bought her this tribal necklace, she hung it in her home after her friend passed away of AIDS. Ralph bought her a few other bits and pieces over their friendship, but this one hung in the doorway as the last thing you saw before leaving Jenny’s home; “I always think of him as I walk past.”
Jenny guided me into the main bedroom and Tara immediately laughed, “Now there was a lot of furniture in here [when we first saw it],” she emphasised ‘a lot’ and Jenny joined in her chortle. It became clear quite quickly that the abounding collection I saw before me was only a fraction of Jenny’s memoir. For every piece she chronicled how the world looked when she obtained it: which country she was in, how the streets looked as she walked down them, and anecdotes about the people she met.
After two months of working closely with Anna and Tara, Jenny and Peters home was finished. Their prized possessions hung on the wall, draped over couches and styled to perfection. The mix matching of so many cultures and experience turned into the story of Jenny and Peter’s great adventures.