Should we always bow to the bubble?

Camille posed the following question, and my response is beneath it.

I have a marital dispute about level floors and furniture/pictures. If our older home (1949 cape bungalow) doesn't have level floors, should we adjust our paintings and furniture to be level with the floor or with gravity? My husband has put shims under a lot of our furniture (even if they are not wobbly), and he has hung pictures according to his gravity-level, rather than adjust to the eye. We are arguing about what the right course of action is. I say don't have lots of wobbly pieces of furniture just so the little bubble in the level approves; it make the furniture look skewed against the crooked wall.

What do you think?

Hey Camille,

Aesthetics is the way to go. In my line of work there is always a tension between what the house is supposed to be and what it’s become. Best case scenario, things should be level and plumb, square, symmetrical, geometrical… but rarely do we have such a best case. More often nature has had its say so regarding our homes. And looking in nature, somehow everything looks natural without having to fit into our manmade rules of how things are supposed to look. In a forest, all the trees stand straight up, but are they all perfectly vertical? Observe the horizon, over all it appears to level out, but what of the hills or mountain ranges? What’s level about them?

Truth is that I don’t use a level near as much as I used to, especially in older homes that have had a chance to develop equilibrium with it surroundings. I use my eye and intuition to make everything “look right.” The bubble should be a guide and not our master. If you spent the money it would take to level your floors, you might get a different answer. But even with perfectly level floors, a level is just a guide because your eye tells you when it doesn’t “look right.” And looking right is what’s most important.

The most important thing is to tend toward an aesthetically correct because in older homes there is often no such thing as mathematically correct. Such correctness is a rarity and even so it is relative correctness. The trick to your furniture/pictures is to let them decorate and accessorize without drawing an un-natural attention to themselves.

Anytime,
Stephen M. Quillian
Craftsman