I believe that things can be both practical and beautiful. In order for a house to stay beautiful, you must have a place for all of the necessary items, so you can put them in their place. For example, when we redesigned this modular to be a passive solar, we put the front door in a location that kept us from being able to have a coat closet. So we painted some boards with hooks that we already had and put a double row behind the front door so the guest coming in the door did not see them first thing, but had a place to hang their coat. I also designed a beautiful bench that my husband built for me to house the messy shoes: In the bedroom, my husband was always bringing in a pile of books that he deposited by the bed. So I redecorated the bedroom and included a storage ottoman that was meant to hold his pile of books: Another fact of life for us, was that we were always changing clothes to go outside to work and usually kept them going for a few days, so we always had "half-dirty" clothes lying around. We finally have a location for our half-dirty clothes in the linen closet in our bathroom where we also store the dirty clothes and the vacuum cleaner. Another thing that always bothered me was that our toothbrushes were always sitting on the counter making messy toothpaste spots and leaving them open for flies to land on them (yuck!) I was looking on the internet one day and ran across the simple method of putting a cutlery tray in the bathroom drawer and keeping them in the drawer while solving both problems: That's why I love our farm so much. Practical and beautiful.