I’m newly-addicted to Homeworthy episodes. I spend each morning on a single one (okay, on weekends, maybe more than one), and I watch it between when the dog wakes me up and my family wakes themselves up. 

While I do love the really elaborate homes, I find the ones where the owners have thrifted beauty on a budget and personality on a pension to be my favorites because that’s what I must do too. 

I love color and cozy. I love quirky and layered. I, too, am in love with whimsy and imagination. Give me interiors collected and slowly evolving. Give me bunting and blossoms, pottery, and art. 

My favorite hosts are usually the Brits with flats full of bits and bobs. Or Bostonians with townhouses chockfull of history. Or New England cottages with hydrangeas to spare. Or Southern homes with plates on the wall. In other words, pretty much anything, if it isn’t too staid or uptight.

Some hosts on Homeworthy sound pretentious and want nothing more than to show off their wealth. Those ones aren’t for me. But others are playful and want nothing more than to showcase their passions. They are the ones I’m drawn to – along with their houses stacked higgledy-piggldey with books or stockpiled with deep, quilted beds and a dark, moody snug.

My son laughs at me and says these videos are the most boring things on the planet. And I smile and think about how my father used to sit for hours ‘round a coffee table with his sibling physicists and draw mile-long equations and I thought the very same thing. 

It all goes to show that when you have a passion for something, you can literally enjoy watching paint dry – which is what I’m currently doing as I pen this as my newly-done dining room dries with Behr’s equivalent of Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster — because, OMG, who can afford $120 gallons of paint???