Tips On Not Buying A Decorative Owl Statue.

Like many people, I spent a lot of Quarantine trying to make my home more comfortable. This was no small task for several reasons. I had only lived here about five months when the lock down started and when I’d moved here I’d done so with all my belongings packed into my little 4-door hatchback. It was me and a cat and some backpacks filled with clothes and books. And that was it. In some ways it was the culmination of a decade spend slowly and deliberately shedding things and slimming down my life. It is possible that when I got here to Monterey I was living as light as I ever will (though I do still harbor the secret ambition to just live out of a backpack, but more on that some other time).

The problem with having only an economy-car’s worth of things though is that it makes the actually-living part somewhat difficult. For instance: nowhere to sit. That first weekend I bought a couch that came in a box and inside of a couple weeks I had a Craigslist kitchen table and a microwave and soon after that a TV and some bookcases. But that was about it those first few months.

One weird thing to know is that I live in an absurdly GIGANTIC apartment. The cost of modern housing being what it is, I have learned not to complain about this, but it is one of those odd ironic curve balls that life throws sometimes. I work for a public university that occupies a decommissioned Army base. I live in the old Army housing, which means that they don’t have studio apartments or anything (because the army had no need for that sort of thing), so I live alone in a two bedroom apartment designed for a military family. When I got the job here I told the housing people I just wanted the smallest, cheapest thing they had, they said, “Sure thing; it’s a 2-bedroom with a garage and a balcony.” God has a sense of humor.

So those first few months this place was pretty bare. A friend of mine called it ‘The Empty Place.”

If you’re into the aesthetic version of minimalism (which I kind of am, but that is really a secondary part of it for me), then you’ve no doubt seen the simple clean lines of white and gray rooms on Pinterest. Always with beautiful old wood floors and great light. Open concept floor plans and lofty ceilings. Kind of Frank Lloyd Wright crossed with the star ship Enterprise sort of look, but with more plants. Well my apartment is not that. Wall to wall cheap-ass carpet in most of the rooms. Old wood kitchen cabinets the color of wet cardboard. One living room wall is unreasonably long. The whole place is just damn weird. Bad design. Roman Mars would be very unhappy with this apartment.

I put my brain to it and tried to figure out how to make this a pleasant home without filling it with a bunch of crap … then Quarantine came along and things got … strange.

Like many people, I was forced to spend so much time here that I noticed every weird uneven-ness in the walls. I noticed every piece of crap joinery on the door frames. The place began to annoy me and rather than feeling like a minimalist, I felt like someone who didn’t know how to make a home, like someone who didn’t know what to put on the walls. And that isn’t actually me. So I went about fixing it. I bought another couch in a box, delivered by a singular intrepid UPS driver. I started my little window sill herb gardens. I bought some rungs and had ordered prints of pictures from my various travels. I even bought a cool black minimal desk for my living room. Throw pillows. Guest bedding. Lamps. I briefly even considered purchasing a decorative owl statue (Did not but it because it didn’t do anything but look like an owl).

By anyone else’s standards, this place is still pretty bare, but I think it is pretty about it.

One time I read an article about the way fancy restaurants and bars are designed and decorated. The guy in the article explained, “people love restaurants because the kitchens are practical and simple, but even better is the sense of plenty: lots of wine, lots of candles.” That made an impression on me and I wrote it down in the Notes app on my phone.   

Simple, but with a sense of plenty.

I guess that is what I have tried to do here, but I still feel weird about it because even though I am still mostly surrounded by things I care about, I do still feel like I could get rid of most of them in a heartbeat. So my minimalist brain shouts at me, “If you can live without them at all, then you should get rid of them now!”

A few months into Quarantine, I realized that all I really needed to live in this apartment is a mattress and a bar stool (the kitchen has a counter bar) and that's it. So why do I have all this other stuff???

The part of me that wants to live out of a backpack also wants to throw out the couches and the rugs and the lamps and the throw pillows. Most days it is a challenge not to over-purge and throw out my flatware. I’m not kidding. I have one set of bamboo utensils. Why do I need more than one knife, one fork, one spoon?

The answer of course is: other people. 

What kind of life are you designing for yourself when the only place to sit in your entire phone is on your one bar stool? It’s a life that doesn’t have anyone else in it. And I know that I would like this life to have other people in it. The loneliness of Quarantine has taught me that. 

Even though I only NEED a mattress and a bar stool, I don’t WANT the life that would create for me. I want a life where I host fucking dinner parties. Right now I could host a small one, but only because I have a table and chairs and haven’t thrown out my flatware yet. Now I just need the people. That part of life is slowly beginning to happen now that we are poking our heads out of our homes like suspicious meerkats.

It isn’t about the stuff, or the lack of it, not at this point in my life anyway. It’s about simplicity with a sense of plenty. The simplicity part I have locked down, now I have to work on the sense of plenty. And that is the work of a life.

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Blame an Architect.

 

I’ve been reading a book called Brave New Home by Diana Lind. It is about housing in America … no, wait, come back! I promise, it isn’t as boring as you think! It’s more a work of Sociology than anything else. Yes, it is about housing, but really it is a history of the way modes of housing interact with our lives in a society. It is about how our spaces shape the lives we live inside of them.

For instance, for most of human history, some kind of multi-generational home was the norm. This made a lot of sense because people didn’t usually move around that much and it actually made living easier because the work of the home was distributed among many people. Grandparents watched the kinds while the parents were out hunting and gathering, etc. This persisted (with exceptions, of course) for most of our time on this planet.

Let’s fast forward to the post-World War II housing boom in America: this is when things really start to change. The Industrial Revolution produced pretty squalid and terrible housing because that’s when people became commoditized as simply “labor” and the living conditions were terrible and over-packed and this is where much of our housing code started, which was a good thing at the time. In the era after World War II, there was a pretty dramatic shift toward the single family detached home. Culturally this had to do with a movement away from the cramped industrial housing of the urban tenement house, but also was a result of the fact that farm boys who’d been drafted and survived the war didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not when the GI Bill would send them to college and government-backed loans allowed them to own their own homes. It is really this period from the late 40s onward that shaped the American idea of what a “home” should be, because that idea had not really existed in this form before that.

Now fast forward to now. Now we know that a whole bunch of single family homes, private, accessible only via car, closed off from the world with big backyards and useless front yards have altered our sense of the individual’s (or the individual family’s) place in society. You can’t sit on the stoop with your neighbors when you have no stoop and have never met your neighbors.

In James Howard Kunstler’s fantastically bitchy book The Geography of Nowhere, he really goes in on the idea that mandatory housing setbacks (how close the house can be to the curb) caused the flourishing of the green front yard with its picket fence, but that they destroyed the community life of the neighborhood.

Lind makes the argument that the idealized “privacy” of the single family home created a mindset that bled over into down market housing like apartment buildings, basically our entire society became about minding one’s own business in the residential sphere and that is reflected in the design of apartments now as well as housing.

The book makes a lot of really good arguments about how ecologically disastrous our current forms of housing are, but this thread about how they have had deleterious effects on the social and community lives is the one that is really connecting with me at the moment. She connects the inbuilt privacy of our housing designs with the increasing epidemic of isolation and loneliness, which we know now translates to actual erosion of health and which (apparently) has been linked to earlier deaths. She even says that smokers with a lot of friends live longer than smokers with no friends, which I thought was interesting.  

I think about this a lot because the walls of my apartment are so thin and poorly insulated that everyone in the building can hear what everybody else is up to. I can hear not just when my downstairs neighbors are having a party, but when they sitting down to dinner. It is always odd to be able to hear so much of these other lives so near my own, but to not be a part of them. There is a line in a poem I have always liked that goes, “almost being there/is a kind of punishment” and that is a little bit of what I am describing here.

In the Robert Putnam book Bowling Alone, he talks about the collapse of American social communities (like churches, bowling leagues, service organizations like the Rotary Club, etc.) have contributed to the splintering of our society into ever smaller and more isolated groups and that idea basically wrote the check for Putnam’s whole career. While I think he was correct, Lind’s idea about the design of our housing working like castle gates to keep us apart from others, seems like a far more practical explanation for some of the ills in our culture.

I think that Roman Mars and 99% Invisible have taught us all about the importance of the design we never think about. I’m writing this the same day I have a physical therapy appointment to work on the pinched nerve in my neck caused by spending 14 months hunched over an impromptu work desk in what is now my office and used to be a guest bedroom. Design and intention matter.

I could go on and on on this topic, but mostly this morning I just wanted to tell you that if you ever feel lonely, you can probably blame an architect, as this is obviously all their fault.

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Our Cardboard Lives.

If you have had moving on your mind as much as I have lately, then you have no doubt thought to yourself, “How come they don’t just make a bunch of furniture out of industrial cardboard that can be delivered to my empty new apartment for not that much money??”

Well the Canadians have heard you and they are on their way to help!

The company Our Paper Life has created a “room in the box” and the minimalist design nerd in me wants one SO BAD.

(I don't know why that video was in Spanish. I swear that it was in English the last time I watched it.)

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Cool Houses in Small Spaces.

Do you remember that time when we met and I awkwardly hit on you and you told me that there was no way in hell and so then I was all like, “Well in that case, can we talk about quirky Japanese architecture for awhile?” and you were all like, “Sure, I have nothing better to do”?

Well I was thinking about that yesterday when I heard a story on NPR about some of the especially interesting work that Japanese designers have recently been doing with very small spaces.

Here is a link to the story.

Even if you don’t want to read/listen to it, at least check out the pictures. They look kind of like Ikea bomb shelters of the future.

I love that there are people out there in the world doing really good and interesting work, whatever that work might be.

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