Elevating The Mundane

Many past clients of mine have had some sort of precious object or heirloom tucked away out of sight. And I totally understand how that can come to be. Some of the most important things to us are not big, grand or expensive; instead, they are mementos of the every day: our favorite book from our childhood or our grandmother’s cookbook.

In a way we feel torn with these things: on one hand, they are worth an awful lot to us but on the other, we know that they don’t appear special to the outside viewer.

Elevating the mundane is one way we can begin to celebrate these minutiae, a way to boldly underline their importance and take them from the every day to the elevated.

For example, when I was little my grandmother made all kinds of homemade outfits for my Barbie dolls. They were hand crocheted tiny dresses with lacy hems, wee rainbow hot pants and pink circle skirts all finished off with delicate but functioning buttons. When I was a kid, of course, they were just part of my toys, totally normal, background noise. But upon finding these as an adult I was completely struck by the level of detail and quality they possessed. (Plus where did one even get those tiny doll-sized buttons in a small northern British Columbian town in the mid-1980s? )

In one of my latest moves I came across them again in a box and was suddenly motivated into taking action. They represented a lot of things to me—family, creativity, talent and hardwork—and I wanted to move them beyond their home in a plastic box in the basement storage locker.

So I framed them.

And I did it myself, staying true to the DIY vibe of the outfits themselves. I put one outfit each in a large white Ikea frame to give them some presence and I hung them up on my wall, stacked one on top of the other. (I didn’t even those fancy shadowbox frames! Just regular ol’ ones.)

It didn’t cost me anything more than the frames and those little outfits suddenly became a real conversation piece in my apartment.

Elevating the mundane is not about what the object actually is; it’s about creating something special with the object. It’s making the ordinary extraordinary.

So if you have any small but important pieces, why not think about how you can elevate them too? I promise that it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or take a lot of your time. I guarantee end results are going to be unique and beautiful—exactly the kind of thing we want to surround ourselves within Conscious Design.

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I hope that was inspiring! Please let me know how the adventures in elevating the mundane go for you.

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