Welcome to Chateau Irreverent.
Stella lives here. She’s that boho chic, fun, funky woman with pink hair who drinks chilled wine at noon, wears sequins to do yard work and treats velvet as a neutral. She collects and creates mismatched things with a sense of ceremony and talks about them like old friends from art school.
Her bungalow suits her. The windows refuse to align, the door has its own agenda and the path swerves like it’s dodging paparazzi. A lone tree stands nearby- straight, stiff and visibly trying to pretend it does not know the house. It has never attended an HOA meeting and quite frankly, who could blame it.
Stella calls the entire situation “design integrity,” and she delivers this phrase with the kind of sparkling confidence that shuts down follow-up questions.
The mountains in the back silently applaud. They’ve never matched anything in their lives.
The neighbors include Mrs. Kravitz from across the street, who has an emotional support clipboard and a tense relationship with whimsy. Mrs. Kravitz has logged 47 violations about Stella’s “aesthetic unpredictability” and makes loud statements about property values into the wind. Stella, being unbothered in every possible dimension, occasionally raises her wine glass in Mrs. Kravitz’s direction and continues her day.
And that, as the mountains will tell you, is the natural balance of the world.