Still life painting with fruit and thrush nest, now for sale.

Two things that never fail to lift our spirits are the aesthetic enthusiasms of our customers, and spending time in nature. This essay explores both within the unifying theme of nesting.

Metaphorical Nesting

Furnishing and accessorizing a home, affectionately known as feathering your nest, is a personal process driven largely by one’s tastes.

While, as another saying goes, there is no accounting for taste (meaning that tastes are wholly subjective, so cannot authoritatively be deemed right or wrong), there can be an accounting of the factors that underlie people’s tastes—or at least psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to develop such an accounting.

Rest assured that scientists involved in the new field of “neuroaesthetics” are diligently mapping areas of the brain that fire up when people react to artworks. Their goal is to understand the basic neural circuitry that underpins humans’ aesthetic judgments, and to explain how and why those powers of discernment evolved.

Meanwhile, in the less reductionist realm of everyday life, we all know what it feels like to have a strong aesthetic reaction to elements of décor such as art and antiques when choosing things to place in our homes.

My own (KH) awakening to how different types of antiques can evoke immediate, gut-level reactions (Love! Hate!) occurred during a time period years ago when we were participating as dealers in a huge New York City antiques show called the Triple Pier Show.

Hundreds of antiques dealers exhibited on each of three long passenger pier terminals that were organized by types of antiques. One pier had fancy things—polished mahogany furniture, fine china and glass, brass light fixtures, diamond jewelry and the like.

The dealers on a second pier displayed mostly vintage clothing, retro kitchen accessories, Bakelite jewelry, and some modern furniture.

We attentively shopped the shows on those two piers in case there was an out-of-place rustic antique to be found, but I was acutely aware of my emotions as I walked through their aisles. I practically got a headache looking at the glitzy things at the fancy pier, and felt dragged down by clutter on the vintage pier.

But on the third pier, dedicated to folk art and Americana (where we exhibited), I breathed easily, and could have explored the booths for hours. Even after seeing all of the merchandise once, I was still interested in going back through just to appreciate intriguing objects and soak up the overall aesthetics of that pier. (Of course many show attendees did just the opposite, rushing half-heartedly through the Americana pier so they could get back to linger and make purchases on one of the other two piers. To each her own tastes!)

Past booths on the Americana pier (photos from antiquesandthearts.com and architecturaldigest.com)

My reactions to the genres of antiques displayed on the different piers were visceral, and an example of the most basic level at which we process aesthetics.

Time and again, we have seen strong visceral reactions being a predictor of what someone will buy at an antiques show. As dealers, it is quite fun to watch someone fall immediately in love with an object in your booth and want to take it home with them.

But beyond how our brain circuitry processes visual stimuli, what underlies people’s reactions to different types of merchandise?

Deeper influences on choices of objects to help make our homes emotionally comfortable and inspirational spaces—our happy nests—are rooted in our cultural attachments and our personal history, our memories and our aspirations.

We bring our whole, complex selves to an aesthetic experience. An object is not beautiful independently of our perceptions and reflections that make it so.

We have found that people who see beauty in rustic antiques bring to that judgment some level of resonance with nature, from fond memories of childhood play or camping in wild places, to avidly observing animal behaviors and habitats, to experiencing the calming effects of gazing at beautiful scenery.

These experiences get tucked deeply away in our psyches and emerge as the chord that gets struck when choosing decorative elements for our homes.

For our customers, making a home a nest—a place that it is as much a psychological comfort zone as it is a physical one—means bringing elements of the outdoors in. We’re happy to dedicate our professional energies to playing a small role in making that vision come to fruition.

Actual Nesting

While supporting human nest-feathering consumes our working hours, another type of nesting consumes many of our (mostly Jeff’s) leisure hours. I’m referring here to literal nesting, as in what birds do during breeding season.

Jeff is a dedicated volunteer in a five-year citizen science project called The Maine Breeding Bird Atlas that seeks to map the locations where different species of birds breed throughout the state. So during the spring and summer he spends many early morning hours walking through a range of habitats to observe and record evidence of what birds are breeding in our region of Maine.

Although finding active nests is not necessary to confirm that a bird is breeding in a location (other behaviors such as hearing a male singing in the same territory over a certain number of days, observing birds carrying food to young, and seeing fledgling birds are also solid evidence of breeding), Jeff happens to have a well-honed search image for bird nests, so tends to find quite a few.

Here are some examples of different types of nests (ground, cavity, platform and cupped forms) that he’s found this season.

An Alder Flycatcher nest in a meadowsweet shrub.

Young Great Blue Herons hanging out in their nest atop a railroad trestle, not quite ready to fly.

An American Redstart sitting on her nest in the crotch of a red maple branch.

A Hairy Woodpecker exiting a nest cavity that it excavated in an aspen tree.

An Eastern Kingbird on its nest on an oak branch overhanging a stream.

A Cliff Swallow in the mud nest it built beneath a bridge.

A Least Flycatcher building a nest in a red maple tree.

A Black-capped Chickadee emerging from its nest hole in a rotten stump.

An American Goldfinch sitting in her cattail-fluff-lined nest in an aspen tree.

A Ruby-throated Hummingbird sitting on her tiny lichen-encrusted nest that she cemented together with spider web filaments.

A Blue-headed Vireo in a balsam fir sapling building a nest from strips of birch bark.

Rustic Unites Metaphorical and Actual Nests

As beautiful as birds’ nests can be, it is an anthropomorphic stretch to say that birds are guided by a sense of aesthetics as they build them.

Whether intricately crafted from fine materials such as reindeer moss, or crudely constructed from inelegant materials such as mud, all nests serve the practical purpose of holding and protecting eggs. Once they fulfill that purpose, they are abandoned (contrary to the tales told in many a children’s book, birds don’t live in nests full-time).

Despite that (and many more) fundamental differences between human nests and bird nests, there is one connection between them for lovers of rustic antiques, and that is organic materials.

Rustic furniture and accessories are by definition made from locally sourced and minimally processed natural materials, which is exactly what birds’ nests are made of, just on a smaller scale.

Bringing elements of nature inside our home nests is not necessary for our physical survival or protection of offspring. But for anyone with whom the rustic aesthetic has personal resonance, being surrounded by reminders of the woods in particular, or of nature in general, can subtly support our mental and spiritual fitness.

Just as nature provides what birds need to build their nests, antiques dealers can provide raw materials for the nests that humans create at home. It is fulfilling to play that small role in the lives of our customers, even if on a much more humble magnitude than what nature provides.

< Back to Jounal

Get Future Articles