Every House Changed Its Clothes at the Equinox

On Tuesday night I took the linen cover off my futon, folded it into the drawer under the window and shook out the cotton flannel that has lived there since May. It is the same bed in the same 48 square metres. It is a different room by morning, heavier, a little closer to the floor, and my feet go looking for it the way they go looking for slippers. I do this every year around the equinox without checking a calendar. This year the wire did it with me.

Openhouse sent its greetings from Kyoto on the Wednesday with a line of plain astronomy: fall is officially here, because the sun has crossed directly over the equator. I was born in that city, and I know how it takes the news. Nobody announces anything. The noren in the shop doorways change weight and the sweets in the windows change colour, and you notice a week later that you have started walking on the sunny side of the street. By the weekend Remodelista had given the change its proper name. Their Current Obsessions for the first official weekend of fall was called Turning In, with earthy colours offered for cool-weather consideration. Turning in is exactly what a house does at this time of year, and it was good to see an American desk say so without dressing it up as a trend.

Once you look for it, the whole northern wire is turning in. Homes & Gardens wrote about the layers designers use to make a bedroom cosy, and the premise is the most honest sentence I read all week: in summer the bedroom is a place where you try to cool down and get some sleep, and in fall it comes into its own again. That is my Tuesday night, written by someone in another country. Elle Decoration in Britain suggested paint colours for an autumn update and called this nesting season, a phrase I would happily steal. And Architectural Digest visited a cabin upstate in New York where Jesse Parris-Lamb arranged small cosy crannies around one very large fireplace for a family of readers. A fire in the middle and a reading nook at the edge is the oldest plan there is for the dark half of the year.

The piece I read twice came from Livingetc, which asked the interior designer Yoko Kloeden for Japanese lighting tricks for the season of more time spent indoors. She opens by observing that as the evenings draw in, most homes reach for the same solution. The summary on our wire stops there, so I cannot tell you what the solution is or what she prefers instead, and I will not guess on her behalf. What I can tell you is that the question is the right one. In a small flat the light changes the room more than any piece of furniture you can afford, and in October it changes it every evening a few minutes earlier than the one before.

Then the closet. &Premium visited the woman who handles press for Jurgen Lehl, and the story is about a closet that is really a rack for each season. In her previous home there was so much storage that everything disappeared into it, including a clothes case she had not opened once since moving in. When she renovated her current home she removed her closets and storeroom entirely so that what she owns stays visible. She changes her wardrobe over twice a year, keeps only what fits on the rack for the season in hand, and hangs it by colour. Koromogae, the seasonal changeover of clothes, is a word every Japanese household knows, and she has built a home around it. AD India arrived at the same place from the other direction, arguing that September is a better time to declutter than January because autumn makes a truer fresh start. I agree with them. The year that matters in a home starts when you first close the window at night.

&Premium also carried news of Utsuwa no Aki, the autumn of vessels, in the hot-spring town of Nagato Yumoto in Yamaguchi, from 2 October to 3 November. It gathers Hagi ware from the Fukagawa kilns, long loved by tea people: five kilns and eight artists, with the main rooms at a venue called Machi no Bandai. I have never been. I do know that in my kitchen the summer glass goes up to the high shelf about now and the thicker bowls come down, and that an exhibition of pottery named after a season makes complete sense to anyone who has done that.

At the equinox every desk on the wire gets roughly the same length of daylight, and the southern desks were facing the other way. Casa Vogue Brasil noted that spring began on Tuesday the 22nd, even with frost and freezing rain still reported in the south of the country, and it was shopping for gardening kits while Britain was choosing paint. In Australia, Homes to Love published a rural home by Rob Mills Architects designed to make the most of every season, which is the right ambition for a house at any latitude. Even in the north the garden people were not ready to go in. Gardenista spent the first days of fall staying out late, looking for ways to stretch the hours in the garden longer and longer.

The longest view came from ArchDaily, in an essay on seasonal movement and architecture in the Gulf. For many communities there, leaving home was once part of living in it: families moved between desert pastures, coastal settlements, wells, fishing grounds and pearling ports as the year turned. In my flat the season moves a few things around me. There, it moved the people. I read it on a train and thought about how small my own version is, a flannel cover and a shelf of bowls, and how it comes from the same place.

Last night the lamp by my one good chair went on at twenty to six, and the window behind it turned into a dark mirror with the lamp inside it, floating over the building opposite. It will go on a little earlier tonight.