brightening up the bedroom

So how far does one try to recreate other rooms when one moves? In our bedroom here in Graham Street, we have the same vase for flowers, the same orange-ish light, on the same low dresser, as we had in the bedroom in Los Angeles - only here the walls are a chill slaty grey, not the Tuscan reds and ochres of Hoover Street. There's a certain comfort in this - as there is downstairs, in the bull's blood red dining room. This isn't an LA echo, however, but an Oxford one: the walls are the same color there, more or less, as the National Trust "Library Red" color that adorned the living room at 16 James Street, and the curtains are the very same ones - which is probably why the kitties are so fascinated by them: the late lamented Charlie Mew (Charlotte Mew at birth, but soon deemed inappropriate, when one saw his little tabby balls) used occasionally to spray on them, in an apparently absent-minded way. So even if the house has nothing in common, really, with a 1925 mock Italian villa, or a late C18th farmhouse knocked around by the Victorians (including William Morris's parents - he of the Morris Motor Works, not Kelmscott and Utopian craftsmanship), there's still a form of decorative continuity, which of course is upheld by the display of portable property in the form of lamps and vases and furniture.