The Piggy Bank Problem

Let me start with a confession: I don't like smalls.

Smalls is what I call all those little objects people love so much. Trinkets. Figurines. Tiny bowls, tiny boxes, tiny framed things. The ceramic bird, the brass bell, the little dish that holds nothing. People LOVE smalls. They pick them up at every thrift store and estate sale and set them on every available surface.

My brain doesn't particularly love them. Too many little things in a room make me crazy. I start to feel the clutter before I can even see it.

So it is deeply funny to me that I collect piggy banks.

How it started

I wasn't looking for one. That's important. I was out hunting, the way I always am, and a little piggy bank caught my eye.

I bought it. That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't. Suddenly I was collecting piggy banks. Now I hunt for them. I have absolutely no rule about this that would survive scrutiny. I just love them, and I always find room for them.

Why this one gets a pass

I've thought about this a lot, because it seems to contradict everything I believe about smalls.

Part of it is that piggy banks have a personality that most small objects don't. They're a little absurd. A pig, holding your money, with a slot in its back. Every culture that makes them makes them differently, every era has its own version, and they're almost always slightly funny. They don't take themselves seriously, which is the quality I love most in a room.

Part of it is that they're a collection, not a scatter. They belong together. One piggy bank on a shelf is a novelty. Several of them, together, is a point of view.

And part of it is just that something caught my eye. That's how the hunt works for me. You can have all the principles you want. Then a pig with a coin slot looks at you from a thrift store shelf and your principles have to make some room.

The real problem with smalls

Smalls aren't bad. The problem is what usually happens to them.

They come home one at a time, easily, because they're cheap and they fit in a bag. Nobody plans where they'll go. So they land wherever there's space: a windowsill, a corner of the bookcase, the edge of the coffee table. Then another one comes home. Then another.

A year later, every surface is covered in little things, none of which relate to each other, and the room feels busy without anyone being able to say why. The big pieces, the good furniture, the art, all get lost underneath.

That's how accumulation hides. Not in big purchases. In small ones.

How to live with little things

If you love smalls, and plenty of people do, there are ways to keep them from taking over.

Make them a collection. A group of similar objects reads as one gesture. Piggy banks together. Brass together. Blue glass together. The same twenty objects scattered across a room read as clutter.

Give them a home. One shelf, one tray, one cabinet, one wall. When a collection has a place, it looks intentional. When it's everywhere, it looks like it got away from you.

Leave space around them. Small objects need negative space to be seen. Crowd them and they disappear.

Edit regularly. Collections should breathe. Put some away. Bring them back later. Let something go when a better one arrives.

And ask why. Every small that comes home should have a reason, even if the reason is just it made me laugh. That's a fine reason. It was a dollar is not.

What the pig taught me

The piggy banks taught me something I now use all the time when I'm styling and sourcing for clients: your rules are a starting point, not a cage.

I'll walk into a client's home with a clear sense of what the room needs. And then I'll see something they own, or something on a hunt, that has nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with them. The skill isn't sticking to the rules. It's knowing when an exception is actually the point.

At Joey Rose, we do a lot of editing, which often means helping people let go of the smalls that have piled up. But we also find the ones worth keeping and give them a stage. Sometimes the strangest little object in the house is the thing the whole room should be built around.

One more

I'm still hunting for piggy banks. I don't know how many I'll end up with. I don't know where I'll put the next one.

I do know I'll find room. I always do. That's the difference between a small and a collection. One is just something you have. The other is something you go looking for.