The getting-to-know-you stage of dating can be wild. You want to learn and reveal just enough—but maybe not too much—because you aren’t entirely sure about the way things will go. This person is a stranger, but a stranger who has captivated you. You can stroll around your city on a date and unknowingly be falling in love while you do. You don’t want the vibe to end, so you find yourself at your place and show them around in an attempt to deepen the connection. There is intimacy in letting someone into your home. You’re giving them a guided tour of the things that make up who you are, were, or are in the process of becoming.
In the 1997 classic romantic film Love Jones, Darius (Larenz Tate) and Nina (Nia Long) are a poet and a photographer who meet on a seductive Chicago night and fall in and out (and in?) of love. In the film’s 108-minute runtime, a messy and tricky kind of relationship is on display. As a viewer, you find yourself rooting for their romance, but also hopeful that they just wait on each other and stay separate until the time is actually right. Woven into the film are their own getting-to-know-you moments, and my favorite is when Darius brings Nina over to his place for the first time.
Darius wants to be taken seriously as a writer. He sits at his heavy 1950s desk complete with photos of past lovers, a typewriter, and inspiring clutter. His bay windows look out over a picturesque tree-lined boulevard on the South Side of Chicago. Tucked into the nook is a well-worn leather chair, a guitar that’s rarely played, and strewn stacks of books, records, and other artsy bits as he hopes to channel James Baldwin or Langston Hughes.
I asked my friend and principal designer/owner of Define Home Design, Casey Scheuerell (who I have made watch a million movies in our 10-year friendship), to chime in on the interiors of Darius’s Chicago apartment. “His place is a classic example of a Chicago courtyard apartment building. Found all throughout the city, this building style became prominent because the design allowed for brighter, more ventilated rooms. I imagine he looked at various apartments, and the views of a neighbor’s brick walls or a trash-lined alleyway in another common type of Chicago apartment building—the two-flat—were not as inspiring as an open courtyard.” (A two-flat is a two-story building with a separate apartment on each floor.)
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