Paul Rubens died this week, marking the end of an era I had appreciated since childhood. As a kid, I was a huge Pee-Wee Herman fan, and to this day, I’m still a fan of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Because of his death, I rewatched that movie for probably the two hundredth time. I love everything about it – the characters he meets on his wacky adventure to find his bicycle in the basement of the Alamo, the scenery, his iconic dance to Tequila. But today I thought a lot about one aspect of that movie that people often fail to mention – Pee-Wee’s house. 

Recently, I read an email newsletter by Anne Helen Petersen with an article entitled “How Your House Makes You Miserable.” The gist of it is this: we want to love our houses, and given the constant barrage of HGTV remodeling shows and other media telling how we need to remodel our homes, we won’t be happy until we remodel our houses. Then we make major changes that will make our homes more stylish or “marketable” should we need to sell them, but those changes don’t reflect our personal styles or what makes us joyful. So even our New-And-Improved houses make us miserable. 

I should mention that I read this article while in the process of making changes to my house. 

Watching Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure today, I was reminded of this article, then struck by the beauty of Pee-Wee’s house. Of course, it’s not beautiful in the traditional sense; his movie house wasn’t the height of 1985 style, or really any particular “style” at all. It’s brightly colored inside and out, full of toys, there is a massive Rube Goldberg machine in the kitchen that makes breakfast, a doghouse for his tiny pooch, Speck, and even a firefighter’s pole to whisk him downstairs. In other words, this house is full of what made the character of Pee-Wee Herman happy. This is the beauty of that house – it makes him happy.

“Marketable” houses are all neutral colors. They don’t have decor that reflects the interests of the inhabitants, they have decor that is fashionable. They have kitchens with professional-level appliances, whether the person living within likes to cook or not. They are bland shells in which to store your out-of-sight possessions.

I was thinking about the eclectic mix of things my husband and I have that would be the first to be hidden if we were going to stage our house for sale: the painting of the Marblehead, Ohio lighthouse that belonged to his grandparents, my small teapot & teacup collection, a print of Old San Juan from the days we lived in Puerto Rico, his collection of vintage beer cans. We’re still living with colors and fixtures left behind by the previous owners of our house: forest green carpeting (and dusty rose carpeting, and beige carpeting), old kitchen cabinets with groovy green and yellow floral contact paper on the shelves, multi-colored enamel light-switch plates. I doubt these people worried, in the over forty years they lived here, about making their house “marketable.” Everything about this house when we moved in reflected what must have made this family happy.

I have resolved to take a page from Pee-Wee and the former owners of my home. I will live in a house that is visually pleasing to me – a kitchen with nearly professional-level appliances (after all, I do love to cook and bake), and cabinets that I probably won’t get sick of looking at after just a couple of years. Flooring in a color I like. Teal tiles for an accent wall behind a bar. All of our decorations, proudly displayed so we can see them every day and remember the wonderful people and times we’ve known in our lives. I’m going to take a cue from Pee-Wee, the architect of zany, child-like humor, and live in a house that reflects me, and makes me happy.