It’s been a landslide couple of weeks. On a personal note, most of our earthly possessions are now in storage (my first time doing so, although I hear it’s not that uncommon). On a societal note, daily—if not hourly—reminders that those of us who get to think about home as a safe space are very fortunate indeed.
ON MY MIND
I’ve been mulling over the role of stuff in our lives. Not in a decluttering way, but how objects inform our daily experience. A lot of people have written on this: there’s the sociological perspective, the architecture critic’s version, the purely anecdotal one, the history of household objects. Creating a comfortable home environment has always been a priority for me, and existing in a liminal space feels quite uncomfortable. But why? I have economic means, family, health. So why are the trappings of a house so paramount?
There are many intangible states that we derive from having things around us, but first and foremost is comfort. Shelter is a basic need, one that combines the two foundational levels in Maslow’s hierarchy (sleep and warmth + safety and security). Anyone working in so-called shelter magazines likely takes this for granted, myself very much included. But to understand home as a hard-wired psychological need both clarifies my own capital-F Feelings about it, and underscores the belief that housing is a human right.
The things one possess can also provide consistency. Everyone’s got their balm in times of upheaval: meditation, mutual aid, a walk outside, the simplicity of a reliable routine. Everything may be going to shit, but a consistent object interaction has its place, no matter how quotidian: that one mug you look forward to pulling out of the cabinet in which you drink the same tea, every morning, with a precisely calibrated amount of milk. (One of my favorite aspects of nosing around a designer’s house involves ritual: seeing what objects they use every single day, à la Michael Anastassiades’s Carl Aubock-designed coffee bean grinder. (Spy it in the kitchen of his home in London, photographed for The Guardian:)
Which brings me to the next sensation: pleasure. Is a Carl Aubock grinder the most efficient grinder available to modern man? Probably not. But as an object, it is beautiful: made from bronze, it has heft and an enjoyable tactility. Which is not to say that pleasure is always precious. A collection of kitschy cookie jars in an otherwise minimalist kitchen brings their owner a lot of joy. A splurge-y towel. A vintage tube amp. An industrial garbage can sourced after years of searching. Consumption for the act of acquisition isn’t what I’m talking about here, but that passionate search for objects one loves and values—tough to argue with that.
SHOPPING
Functional: Cheap? No. Practical forever? Yes!! Every time I get ready to move, it occurs to me how nice it would be to have one storage unit… than can be moved around… that could hold, say, art or paper ephemera or documents… and then I remember that such a thing exists. This version with casters comes in colorful melamine. Etsy abounds with vintage ones as well.
Frothy: When I envisioned what the bedroom in Goodnight Moon might look like IRL, I had not yet spotted this tiger rug. It’s faux, it’s feisty, and it’s sure to be the cherry on top of any budding maximalist’s nursery.
THINGS TO READ
If you read one smidgen of design criticism this week, make it the ever-observant Kate Wagner’s screed against “coronagrifting” on her site McMansion Hell.
Up next on my bookshelf: Pulitzer finalist Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor’s recent op-ed on the Minneapolis protests, a clear articulation of the division between black and white America and how it’s played out in the pandemic, is also a must-read.
A pair of dispatches from the New York Times in which non-design-beat writers describe their domestic fantasies (aka “insane quarantine hobby”): homesteading in LA and Zillow spiraling.
Americans’ spending habits = a snake eating its own tail. Anne Helen Peterson investigates our consumption patterns and surfaces some statistics that will make you cringe (average annual household expenditure is more than $60,000, retail sales plummeted in April with home furnishings purchases down nearly 60%) alongside interviews that you will probably relate to.
This piece made we want to break out the cheat codes and build elaborately-detailed virtual homes for avatars of my friends and family. A Cape Cod-style with deciduous trees for my parents… a Vermont farmhouse for newly-communing friends with kids… a cabin in the woods with a stream out back and a chicken coop for my sister-in-law…
Take care out there,
Kelsey