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Jenny Sais Quoi: Adventures in Vintage and Personal Style, the new book by tastemaker Jenny Walton, is exceptionally personal—it’s part scrapbook, part diary, part sketchpad, and part photo-essay. Yet it’s also relatable: Readers will have the distinct thrill, flipping through Jenny’s illustrations and selfies and sketches and reading her personal essays, of seeing themselves in her shoes. Below, Jenny shares pictures from places she’s lived in Italy, alongside an essay from the book entitled “Learning How to Love” about a universal experience: settling into a new home.
Decorating a home is like getting to know a new love. One cannot enter directly with embellishment; that would be far too abrupt a start to such a momentous, romantic affair. Still, revelry in the excitement of an emerging odyssey should never be contained. Buy the lilies, even if the walls still wear their dust. A few glasses may be quickly unwrapped, and a mirror hastily hung. A folding table and cold champagne procured quickly and popped open in celebratory abandon. Bliss naturally surfaces in these first flickers, rising as soft and effervescent as bubbles in a crisp sparkling wine on a balmy summer’s twilight. These moments were meant to be savored, gulped down selfishly in the safe sanctuary previously relegated only to our dreams. As the minutes morph into months, one should awaken to morning light, still drunken and grinning in that hazy dawn of blossoming beginnings.
As dreams turn into days, the afternoon light will occasionally make its gradual sweep across the sun-basked room, and the chipped terra-cotta tiles, which upon first inspection seemed charming, will begin to lay bare their deepest cracks. These imperfections must be faced not with a need to fix, but with a quiet reverence for all that has come before. Some we may try to repair, while others might be too deep to touch. We leave them as gentle reminders of all that has come before us, honoring the resilience of the heart and hearth that found the courage to endure such seismic tremors. In these vulnerable moments of truth, a valiant attempt at nonjudgment holds immeasurable weight. A new love is fragile: a careless comment can shatter intimacy as swiftly as the errant swing of a hammer to glass.
Natural beauty shines when polished, not chiseled. The quick, bright strokes of white paint on chestnut beams, the careless traces of past inhabitants, must be stripped away so the wood can breathe again. When love’s warmth becomes their gentle scaffold, the dismantling of a wall is a much safer affair. So we move slowly, with deserved respect. As we trace the contours of their spirit in the space that their walls and bodies enclose, our understanding of our new partners deepens with time. And as it always happens, just as certainty settles, a new blossom unfurls. In the garden, birds build their nests in the oak tree, while a couple lies in the dappled light underneath, sharing truths too sacred to be spoken before. We learn to love the never-ending journey of discovering the many, layered sides of the people and places we love.
