The Gift of 'Home'

She-time is the time a woman takes to achieve a relaxed and balanced mood that nurtures her well-being.

For more than a half-century, Ella Patterson's signature blend of comfort, style, and intimacy has been a source of inspiration in the homes of family, friends, and co-workers. Now in homes across America Ella will share she-time moment secrets to help you create intimate atmospheres, luxurious, refreshing spaces that are as beautiful as they are practical and as distinctive as the rest of your home.

One of the gifts of my growing up years was having places in our home that I could call my own. At least that is how I felt about them. Of course, I had my own bedroom, but when I was very young, I shared with my younger sister. It was not just my bedroom, but it became one of the most endeared places in my heart and mind. As I got older my mom moved into this huge three-story home that I later discovered had been a former funeral home.

Our home was a Polish Funeral home that my mom bought and renovated into an eight-bedroom home for our family of eight children. This home was a Queen Anne Victorian three-story beauty with lots of spaces, fireplaces, and rooms that were enormous. On the first floor to the left of the living room, there is a sunlit breezy patio that led to an outside garden that sits off from the living room. It is filled with the most beautiful pottery and plants. I entered my secret place through a beautiful door. It looked like a window that you had to raise to enter. To the right of the front door, there was a parlor, chapel, huge office, and den. To the left were the living room, dining room, a separate sitting room and a huge secluded master bedroom. Upon entering the front door - directly forward, but towards the back was a huge full-sized kitchen. To the right of the living room was a nice sized sewing room. Inside our home was an enormous hallway/front entryway that was as wide as it was long. To the right of the hallway a little past the chapel was a magical winding staircase that led to the basement or the upstairs. On the way to the basement, my mom had a built-in cabinets where she kept cookies and goodies for the kids whenever we exited the doorway that was on a landing midlevel of the stairway. There was lots of food and canned fruits that mom made into Christmas jams and jellies stored there too. After school I hovered there, dreaming and often reading books that I had checked out of the library.

At the top of the steps was another landing that I called my secret place and beyond those only three steps higher was a bench that sat under a tall window where I was the sole occupant for such enterprises as my girlhood-writing getaway. Beyond that there was about five steps higher that lead to a second floor that had a huge sitting room that my mom changed into a TV / family room that is flanked by seven bedrooms and each with its own fireplace. To the right in the back was a full-size marble countered kitchen.

I have never forgotten those precious she-time moments in those secret, just-mine places where my imagination grew. I try to maintain this kind of spirit in my own home, and its secret places where  I find solace and peace while not nearly as enchanting, but are still my favorite parts of the house.

The very heart of any home is its privacy. For this is where we are the most ourselves. Privacy is a chair under a sunny window where one can dream, read and think and later maybe to explore and discuss a problem, tell a story or keep a secret. Privacy is having a picnic in bed with a favorite person sharing your dreams, goals and intimate desires, which is the essence of this book.

“When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign, is Solitude.