How normie minimalism and farmhouse chic took over contemporary design
hyperallergic.com
hyperallergic.com
Oh shove it.
I like minimalism because I grew up in a house with 6 tvs for 4 people, and so many tupperware containers that it could take a solid 10 minutes (not exaggerating!) to find a matching container and lid. Finding a lid for a stove pot was of similar difficulty.
So yeah, I have one set of storage containers from Costco (the same set pretty much everyone else has) and one set of pots and pans with matching lids, and little enough stuff that I can mostly find what I want.
Minimalism is nice because it allows people to take control of their stuff, instead of stuff taking control of them. Minimalism is nice because I can go buy a few well made pieces of furniture that will last a long time.
And minimalism is nice because it is a lot easier to dust.
Edit: After giving it 5 minutes of thought, it becomes apparent that minimalism is extremely anti-consumerism.
"Buy less stuff! Buy a few high quality items that last a long time! Don't get doilies for your couch arms!"
No wonder American furniture retailers took forever to get on board. Heck up here in the Pacific Northwest it is still hard to find good modern furniture stores. Back when I graduated college and started outfitting my apartment, Ikea was pretty much the only show in town.
Although our living room is very spacious, my wife and I are using one old table as both working desk and dining table. The old table is not in good condition, not matching with our cheap $15 plastic chairs, but we do not feel the need to spend money to buy new one. I think we are simply cheapskate, as well as not concerned about look.
The author's thesis statement seems to be that the public is a bunch of gullable fools who have been sold a style that was somehow "stolen" from the "authentic" artists the mid 1900s, who are, apparently, the only ones allowed to live in lofts and own a one piece couch.
> When thinking of minimalism, one can only wonder what the once-avant-garde cadre of artists and musicians would think about this hyper-commodified end product of their ethos, practice, and even their living circumstances.
The artists lived as such because they had shit to do, paintings to paint, music to write and practice.
People choose minimalism for the same reasons, so that they can live their lives and not futz around with possessions.
> Either way, somebody’s making a lot of money.
Probably not, wicker basket sales are way down.
The author is so elitest she somehow thinks that average people know what the hell Design Within Reach even is. I'd bet money that 90% of the US population has no idea about DWR.
And Pottery Barn only recently, very recently, started selling stuff that even approaches "modern" or "minimalist". If someone asked me to describe Pottery Barn 5 years ago I'd say "another one of those stores selling overly ornate crap that shouldn't exist." (See also: 90% of everything ever sold at Pier 1)
> Every realtor, in increasingly aggrandized text boasts each instance of charm and authenticity, each listing’s Real-American-ness,
That is every real estate agent ever. Their job is to literally sell every possible iteration of the American Dream. Heck one real estate listing I saw recently had a photo with fake dog posed playing with a toy. Lame? Kinda, but it got the point across.
I'd argue that artists lived as such because the large majority of them couldn't afford furniture.
They couldn't afford furniture because they prioritized, in com2kid's words "shit to do, paintings to paint, music to write and practice."
You're not arguing, you're agreeing.
Also applicable to everyone who graduated college with tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
But even minimalism is different than that, it is purposefully forgoing ornamentation. A paint brush and some salvaged 2x4s can go a long way, if one chooses.
I love the modern aesthetic, probably because I grew up in a frank lloyd wright-style home.
I think the farmhouse look is acceptable because our house is on a farm, and most of those pieces are locally sourced antiques. (I’m cheap, what can I say?)
But, yeah. No authentic nostalgia or cultural legitimacy here.
One tries for aesthetics of minimalism, the other one can be actually physically minimalist but not share that aesthetic at all.
And of course, neither one has really anything to do with the fact that minimalism is generally a useful design choice because it allows people to actually make choices about what they want their set of possessions to actually mean to them, by virtue of having as few as possible.
But the article starts bad-mouthing minimalism hard. I wonder if the author ever bothered asking anyone why they like having less stuff? I personally thing it is a yo-yo effect from the previous generation having too much stuff.
My Dad considered cable TV to be 100% necessary and there was always at least 1 TV on in the house at all times.
I've never paid for cable TV. The TV I do have is not in any of the main living spaces, and it is off 95% of the day. Heck I primarily use it to pump audiobooks through from my phone.
Looking at the minimalist kitchen photo at the top of the article, I don't see how it could even work. There are no appliances other than the stove and oven: no refrigerator, dishwasher, or microwave. And the shelves hold (literally) four dishes and 5 spices. Is everything hidden in the drawers? Not to mention the lack of electrical outlets, which violates code. The more I look at that photo, the more it puzzles me.
See also the similarly tagged images such as [2] which seems to also include a non-kitchen over in its back corner.
Otherwise, it looks fairly similar to any modern apartment in Denmark.
https://www.realmaeglerne.dk/bolig/115-0836-store-kongensgad...
https://portal.newsec.dk/bolig/ledig-privat-bolig/historisk-... (unfurnished, but presumably includes an integrated dishwasher and fridge)
It is possible to get unusable either way. :/
> A side effect of the fetishization of the industrial is that it aestheticizes the backdrop of labor within capitalism, in many ways erasing labor’s histories of toil and struggle.
"Why, of course a white kitchen signals you as an enemy of the people. It's so obviously counterrevolutionary!"
I imagine stern, angular posters, "Mind your palette, comrade!"
The piece isn't just Marxist, it's Soviet.
But also... schizophrenic? You can't idolize the humble worker while hating "normies." The top 1% alone don't make something ubiquitous. The eccentric preferences of billionaires aren't driving the aesthetics that take over Target and starter homes or get featured on reality TV.
But anything can symbolize anything with the right narrative attached. It's just word games to criticize people when you don't like their personal tastes.[0]
Even if weren't for the flawed reasoning, the sentiment is pretty important here. If someone started going around dismissing other commenters as "normies" in these threads, we wouldn't demand careful rebuttals and carefully pull out their good points. We'd just flag them and move on. But that's the whole climax and title of this article! Why is it suddenly cool here? Because she's leveling insults at people we might not like?
Is "don't insult people, unless you happen to not like them," really the threshold?
[0] She does the same thing on McMansion Hell, which while sometimes amusing, has basically morphed into this whole attempt to cast people as deeply immoral because they wanted a skylight where she wouldn't have put it. And people love her for it, and that's great, but people love cynically piling on and judging other groups of people for the most trivial reasons. Doesn't make it nice.
My favorite example being random columns. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWGPsS0dh5k)
Windows of random styles is another irritation of mine, doing so serves no purpose, and it makes the house look worse.
Ditto with random mixings of different types of siding material. Done right, changes in texture can look good, but many McMansions don't do it right, they just put a stone facade somewhere because the house needs stone on the outside somewhere as a checklist item.
And checklist describes McMansions perfectly. They are designed to have features, not to be livable spaces. I've seen 1600sqft houses with 4 bedrooms that are spacious and bright, and I've seen 2200+ sqft McMansions that are tight and narrow, with lots of wastes space on hallways.
Then again I have a near moral opposition to houses that have both formal and informal dining rooms. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen formal dining rooms actually used for something.
I feel much the same way about family rooms and living rooms. The coastal cities have a bloody shortage of affordable housing and developers are burning square footage on 2 dining rooms and 2 living rooms per house.
Honestly I think most people look for large square footage houses because they have never seen a house under 2000sqft that is properly laid out.
Now if she wants to write an article about irritated she is with houses advertised as minimalist that have a formal dining room, a breakfast nook, an informal dining area, a family room, and a living room, and a 3 car garage, well then, I'll be out in the comments showing my full support. :)
There is just so much stuff, multiples of everything, at least a hundred Tupperware containers in the kitchen.
My mom grew up rather poor, and I've talked to her about her borderline hoarder tendencies. She says it's an unconscious thing, stemming from when her family couldn't afford to buy new things, so they saved everything that could possibly be repaired or repurposed, and she falls into a tendency to still do the same thing. Over 24 years living in that house, it just kept accumulating. It's not like it's a mess, mostly everything is nicely organized, there's just a lot on every shelf and in every drawer stuffed to the brim.
I fell into the same pattern for a while, keeping extras around of a bunch of things for no real reason, combined with being very bad at throwing things out or giving them away. I've gotten better, but it's a constant thing.
If you like cooking, wouldn't a kitchen be important to you?
What if you do woodworking, or you work on motorcycles in your free time? Then does a garage make sense?
Also, cliche design trend or not, almost anything is better than the neo-eclectic style that took over the U.S. in the 90s (e.g., houses like this: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/4e/fa/ca4efad94007d5a5f976...)
Edit: just noticed that although I am not fond of the article and its writing style, the author is actually the person who created the McMansion hell blog, which criticizes the same type of neo-eclectic house style that I also criticize above. Go figure.
The picture you linked to could have been taken in any one of them. It's pretty depressing, but then again, I live in a cabin in the woods (definitely not for everyone) so to each their own I suppose.
This is so incredibly on point it's actually sad, but on the flip side I'm happy someone who knows this stuff much better than I do is actually writing about it
I was thinking of remodeling our kitchen, and the thought of what that would look like was... light gray.
It better than 70s overcrowded earthiness (imbued with smoke) and accented with avocado greens.
I' like to see their take on sunken living rooms though.
> I remain convinced that the next true popular aesthetic will be an offshoot of art deco combined with heavy nature related elements.
The next wave of tech is clean tech.
Electric cars and lab cultured meat.
We've entered years of clean designs of pure white backgrounds derived from Apple and more recently the pastels. There's no chaos with our designs and too much order.
I think Travis Kalanick was right to enter the real estate/land use industry. I think Stanford and Harvard buying up real estate in the central valley of California is the smartest decision.
We're going back to the land, just like the 70's.
The fact that it became adopted everywhere is just painful to me. Note how everybody starts putting rugs everywhere in order to damp the noise ("They improve the vibe, man.").
The Japanese seem to do better at this where their "minimalist" is driven by lack of space rather than misplaced aesthetics.
> Their commonality lies in the same impulse for vacuous, petit bourgeois taste to launder itself in narratives of nostalgia and cultural legitimacy. When thinking of minimalism, one can only wonder what the once-avant-garde cadre of artists and musicians would think about this hyper-commodified end product of their ethos, practice, and even their living circumstances.
You can't just say the equivalent of "man I can't believe the suburban normies found out about farmhouse lofts -- look at what they took from us" and have that be an actual article. That's a concept barely fit for a bored teen tweeting during an art history class (no offense to them either, they would obviously be a lot more self aware than this), much less a longwinded magazine article.
Frankly, those frontier domesticating artists who pioneered the cultural idea of a loft are far closer to true upper caste brahmins than the lumpenproletariat vaishyas (which are conflated with the petit bourgeois in a very subtle yet choppy interpolation) that necessarily only later on adopt a diluted version. And of course, it is those brahmin who reap the benefits of clout as their risky phenomenological investment is able to mature to a culturally valuable product and legacy that consumers cannot proclaim founding ownership over. One can only wonder what they would have thought -- to be honest, I can only imagine that they would be very happy and relieved to get a chance to cash out, because being an artist is an extremely competitive and generally financially unstable and unpleasant existence that is only truly available as a vocation to the upper castes. And ironically, I get the sense that it is the author trying to launder their own personal distastes aesthetic distaste through a ham fisted attempt to deploy Marxist terminology ("fetishize", "erasing", "bourgeois") at suburban denizens rather than any real reckoning with the political economy of the commodities that they even reference.
Surely, America is in many ways a deeply, tragically uncool, suburban place where many people "just want to grill, for god's sake." But, it is that way unapologetically -- in some ways, unapologetic in a way that should maybe never be apologized for. America's suburbs are the promised land where so many people the world over seek a reality that maybe isn't perfect but an improvement to their current lot in life. It is a place of sameness, vacuum of space, and twee; it is a place of rurality and peaceful escape from society. It is a place where profound works of irony, satire and excess (unintentional and intentional) originate from; it is this excess which hypothecates Hollywood's culturally productive and originative influence not just in America but the world over; horrifying, to be sure, but also beautiful. Frustrating, at times, and yet sublime. To neither grasp nor express such a giant, sprawling plurality and how a thing of almost fractal bifurcations of seeming contradictions doesn't just fall over, is to me proof that perhaps this piece of writing still needs a good amount more revision, additional detail, and conceptual depth before it actually makes a statement. It's a shame because there very likely is a fascinating connection between pop minimalism and neo-farmhouse aesthetics there to be explored. But frankly, it would need to be explored by an author with a deft enough understanding of the people and communities who actually live in the areas they comment on to actually represent them thoughtfully -- or at least someone who had the desire to gain such an understanding.
> You can't just say the equivalent "man I can't believe the suburban normies found out about farmhouse lofts -- look at what they took from us"
I really don't see how you got that from the quote you shared
To phrase it a different way, is a good Apple laptop from the golden era of Apple laptops (which is good because it is minimal and functional) any less good once many people start using it and it stops being avant-garde? Or is its popularity simply a vindication of its successful product design, reflected by the market? If it's the latter, then I'd be inclined to agree with that definition of good. But if it's the former, I'd be inclined to question whether the definition a slick attempt to hide someone's opinions, and maybe their desire to gatekeep.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/making-america-crass-aga...
Consider this:
Everywhere you look, the rich don't have some yearning for minimalism. They have massive, lavish gates, gardens filled with sculptures and fountains, and if they are really going for it, interior cloisters with basketball courts and other amenities. High ceilings? Absolutely. Plenty of light? More than the building codes allow.
That cottage they constructed on their massively acred forest property that's featured in some minimalist architecture digest magazine? That's for fun. Look at how much they paid (if they disclose) the architect to just design the thing. Good luck affording that.
A bittersweet irony of life is minimalists eschewing anything to do with decorative veneer, while they jetset away to pose next to architecture from centuries past that screams opulence with the amount of detail and decorative elements that it has.
Taste cannot be bought, even if it's shaped like a rectangle, made out of exotic wood, called "minimalist", and priced way out of your budget range to make you feel like you're somehow buying a one-of-a-kind item that will last you forever, because hey, you want fewer, but "higher quality" items, right?