JULY 2 0 1 9 I BOROMAG.COM 41
While some people swear by Marie
Kondo’s popular Kon Mari
method of decluttering and minimal
living, Sarah Usher practices
the opposite. Usher surrounds
herself with mementos from
her travels and trinkets from her
childhood, but everything she’s kept — in the
words of Kondo — brings her joy.
Usher, a publicist, has lived in her building
on 30th Road for five years, but she’s been in
Astoria for 15. Previously in an apartment on
Crescent Street for 10 years, she had to relocate
when the building was sold. Lucky for
her, she only had to move four blocks. Usher
started out in the lower apartment of the
two-family duplex, but has since swapped
with her neighbor to the upper level.
“I love it. It's neighborhood-y,” she said
of Astoria. “I feel very much like I’m coming
home. I used to work in the city — now
I work in Williamsburg — but I do think it's
nice to not be exactly where you're working,
to have somewhere to come home.”
Usher’s achieved this by filling her apartment
with tributes to family and her childhood
in Maryland. Throughout the space,
collections of turtles, bananas, seashells and
rocks decorate every inch of surface area.
“I like to collect stuff, as you can see,”
Usher said as we walked through her apartment.
“I think I started collecting a lot of stuff
when I was young and I've just added to it
over the years.”
One of Usher’s first collections was turtles.
There are ceramic turtles, glass turtles,
plush turtles, a turtle stool and even a real
turtle, Abby (she roams around the apartment
along with Usher’s black cat, Max).
The bananas started as an inside joke
with her sister. Usher’s sister has always
called her “Sarah Banana,” so throughout
the years they’ve gifted each other items
with bananas — paintings, figurines, pillow
cases and a teapot, to name a few. Moving
through her apartment was like an “Eye
Spy” game, searching for all the turtles and
bananas.
/BOROMAG.COM
