9 ms·

If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comfor

If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't. The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.

Insanity 2mo ago
This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book. And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.
SoftTalker 2mo ago
I think there's a lot of unappreciated benefits in "staying put." Of course if you're living in a bad situation that might not be true, and it might not be good for your career or for other material reasons, but it can be good for your mental health. My parents owned one house, and we never moved. I grew up there and I still own it. I don't live there currently but every time I am in that house I'm calm, relaxed, and comfortable almost immediately. It's nothing fancy, just a normal ranch house, but it's very familiar and full of memories.
- tekne 2mo ago
  This explains a lot... I feel bad when I think about staying put. Forward always feels better. It's like one of the fundamental axes, I guess.
bear141 2mo ago
I see where you are coming from and I think this is an interesting observation. Especially when talking about companies and people moving apartments every year. I grew up in a house full of the clutter that you describe as comforting, but for me it felt smothering. I recently inherited the house I grew up in and now have it set up much less cluttered. I don’t plan to live anywhere else anytime soon, but for me the lack of clutter and clear spaces are much more comforting. I am definitely not a fan of crazy colors or patterns or bad lighting either though.
appreciatorBus 2mo ago
I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design. If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- WillAdams 2mo ago
  Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence. Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
  - fcarraldo 2mo ago
    The rich also can afford to keep their minimalist modern spaces clean and clutter-free, through paying staff. These environments tend to look awful when not tended to continuously because a single out-of-place item is so clearly visible. Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
    - kakacik 2mo ago
      They are awful to even look at, IHMO. Cold, sterile, tells something about people living in such fugly soulless places. Which is fine to be honest, its nice to see clearly the type of person on the other side of the table, no need to dig through empty speech clutter for clues. But impressive it is not.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
obscurette 2mo ago
I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".
- singingtoday 2mo ago
  That's such a great insight. Thank you for sharing this.
- kmfrk 2mo ago
  The acoustics of homes with clean walls and floors can also be absolutely miserable. Some small dining rooms amplify all the worst noises and make it terrible to be in, drains your mental battery like few other things.
  - theoreticalmal 2mo ago
    I’m so glad to see someone else who thinks this. Barren walls, vinyl flooring, 5k Kelvin lights, and scented candles everywhere. It’s like the most miserable consumerist environment imaginable.
    - thih9 2mo ago
      There was a reason for those popcorn ceilings and carpeted floors (and it clearly wasn't aesthetics).
    - mghackerlady 2mo ago
      A good scented candle can really help make a room feel better. Scent in general does that, though. Incense or a fireplace could also work
  - 2mo ago
alehlopeh 2mo ago
The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.
- pishpash 2mo ago
  If anything, offices are likely designed to not feel comfortable so you are forced to focus on your screen and work. Otherwise, rooms were more comfortable than cubicles, cubicles were more comfortable than open benches, open benches will be more comfortable than whatever AI-adjacent abomination surely to come...
  - skyberrys 2mo ago
    Really curious to imagine what these AI-adjacent abominations could be. Some sort of people conveyor belt we have to work on while rotating past other humans to achieve maximum 'collaboration' perhaps? Offices built into semi trucks so we get picked up and crammed together with our laptops and screens? When will it stop!
dfc 2mo ago
What design trends can be attributed to people's desire to pick up and move at a moment notice?
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Not having bookcases full of books, for example. My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
  - nly 2mo ago
    You can...move books.
rr808 2mo ago
My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their house for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors? Edit yes I did move around in my twenties, but that stopped at 30.
- Spooky23 2mo ago
  Remember people marry later if at all so you break the cohort developments of growing up and adulting. I helped lead my local little league. It’s different than it used to be - it’s pretty typical to have tball parents in their 40s. A group of parents from 20s to 50s aren’t going to hang out, they don’t relate. I’m a late genx, most of my friends parents were in their 30s when I was a little leaguer. The demise of old line churches is similar. We did CYO basketball in the same parish my wife did. It’s the last of what was 8-10 catholic parishes in my city. And unlike in my youth where you had good mix multigenerational parishioners… the parish survives based on the beneficence of 5-10 people in their late 60s and 70s, with few people rising to behind them. Mainline Protestant parishes are similar. The only growth in religious communities are independent Baptists, which are great but integrate into the broader community differently, because each church mostly stands alone and isn’t part of a bigger system.
  - frogperson 2mo ago
    Church groups, or at least an awful lot of them, were co-opted by groups like the Council For National Policy (parent group of the Heritage Foundation). I think a lot of younger folks see through the BS and don't want to send their time listening to hate speech discussed as gospel. These churches chose thier path, and so did their parishioners.
    - antonymoose 2mo ago
      What church(es) are you thinking of here exactly? I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life. On the contrary, most folks in the 20-40 range are tired of “cafeteria Christian” denominations that pick and chose which parts of scripture to stand by and which go ignore based on ever shifting social trends, whether it be so-called woke churches hosting drag performers or Boomer-tier Endtimes preachers that can’t stop talking about their all expense paid Israeli “pilgrimage.”
ericmay 2mo ago
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one. 1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with. 2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?) Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.
- 2mo ago
mike_hock 2mo ago
The article also doesn't touch on whether visually cluttered "traditional" decor is better for people affected by those conditions. I found the office in the picture quite pleasant to look at. Not comforting and homey but suitable as a work environment.
ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company! There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint. It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige. That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic. It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour. "But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?" He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  I'm told that because so many cars are the ugly gray that cars have color are selling better nowadays. It may be only a minority that want color, but that minority is willing to pay for it and they look at their choices and your car is the only one they can go for. I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I don't need to drive, luckily, but I heard that cars cost so much these days that you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible. Cars cost what shitty houses used to cost, even adjusted for inflation.
  - ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
    > you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible Why? Just buy a car, and drive it.
mgfist 2mo ago
> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did The theory I subscribe to is a few fold: 1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize 2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value 3) Thus homes stay boring and generic
ajsnigrutin 2mo ago
A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.
agumonkey 2mo ago
I see strange market forces where companies need to be trendy, so they absorb what's in the air, and then people kinda have no choice but to buy it. Nobody really wanted to but it materializes. Around me every house now has tall anthracite fully closed fences. It's gloomy as hell, streets went from cute garden with wood fences to lock-down mode in a few years. It's all the same model, all the same vibe..
nicbou 2mo ago
A home you inhabit for a long time molds to your day-to-day life. The objects you surround yourself with are not a design choice, but a series of practical solutions to everyday problems. A house becomes a home when you absent-mindedly put down your favourite teacup, and it falls on the coaster you put there five years ago. There's a pillow that makes your reading chair fit just right. The art on the walls was curated over years, and each piece means something. Modern decor is what happens when you just go on Pinterest and outsource taste for a place you don't own and don't expect to live in for long. It feels sterile because it does not represent any specific person, only an algorithmically-designed aesthetic built from off-the-shelf components. I help immigrants move to Germany, and I think that people only become Berliners when they can put their own art on the walls. It means that they finally get a sense of permanence, and have a space of their own that they want to invest in. It changes your whole perception of the city you live in.
- mghackerlady 2mo ago
  On the other hand, I do think selecting some things purely for design reasons makes things better. A random knicknack you don't need but fits aesthetically is good. Also, selecting things you know you need like furniture to fit a specific style is good if you the style brings you joy
qwertyuiop_ 2mo ago
Spot on ! Just watch Columbo and tell me how you feel after observing the decor. https://tubitv.com/series/300006728/columbo https://tubitv.com/series/300006728/columbo
sandworm101 2mo ago
It is old money v new money. Old money has things. If they want to go skiing, they have a set of skis in the garage and a family cabin near the slopes. If they want to go fishing, they have a boat ready on a trailer. New money isnt about having thing but having power to acquire, to congure up things as needed. New money doesn't own skis. New money rents them. New money doesnt have a boat parked behind thier garage, they have an empty (minimalist) garage and will buy a boat a month before the trip, having it delivered to the lake by someone who owns work gloves. Old money collects a household of things over decades. New money leaves a trail of discarded junk that was used once and disposed of shortly thereafter.
_the_inflator 2mo ago
I agree with you. Victimhood par excellence: "My brain is a 200+ IQ machine desperately waiting for input. However, I cannot feed it! It is the walls, I guess." It should be legally enforced to place every author's smartphone usage statistics into such articles. No interior design on earth can compensate for 40 hours TikTok usage per week. And we didn't mention other streaming services as well. It might be the smartphone usage as well as time spend.
INTPenis 2mo ago
Depends on your perspective. Yes I grew up with that type of decor, but it doesn't comfort me today because all I can think of are all the knocks and crannies where dust and pollen doesn't get cleaned out of.
ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago
Even those homes these days are all LED that flicker during saccades.
glimshe 2mo ago
I feel the opposite. I find old homes heavy, cluttered (as you said) and oppressive. I love clean and modern environments.
KoolKat23 2mo ago
I've come to realize clutter makes me anxious. This is a quite common for people. Sadly I still own lots of shit.

Insanity 2mo ago

This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book. And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.

SoftTalker 2mo ago

I think there's a lot of unappreciated benefits in "staying put." Of course if you're living in a bad situation that might not be true, and it might not be good for your career or for other material reasons, but it can be good for your mental health. My parents owned one house, and we never moved. I grew up there and I still own it. I don't live there currently but every time I am in that house I'm calm, relaxed, and comfortable almost immediately. It's nothing fancy, just a normal ranch house, but it's very familiar and full of memories.

tekne 2mo ago
This explains a lot... I feel bad when I think about staying put. Forward always feels better. It's like one of the fundamental axes, I guess.

bear141 2mo ago

I see where you are coming from and I think this is an interesting observation. Especially when talking about companies and people moving apartments every year. I grew up in a house full of the clutter that you describe as comforting, but for me it felt smothering. I recently inherited the house I grew up in and now have it set up much less cluttered. I don’t plan to live anywhere else anytime soon, but for me the lack of clutter and clear spaces are much more comforting. I am definitely not a fan of crazy colors or patterns or bad lighting either though.

appreciatorBus 2mo ago

I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design. If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
WillAdams 2mo ago
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence. Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
- fcarraldo 2mo ago
  The rich also can afford to keep their minimalist modern spaces clean and clutter-free, through paying staff. These environments tend to look awful when not tended to continuously because a single out-of-place item is so clearly visible. Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
  - kakacik 2mo ago
    They are awful to even look at, IHMO. Cold, sterile, tells something about people living in such fugly soulless places. Which is fine to be honest, its nice to see clearly the type of person on the other side of the table, no need to dig through empty speech clutter for clues. But impressive it is not.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]

obscurette 2mo ago

I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".

singingtoday 2mo ago
That's such a great insight. Thank you for sharing this.
kmfrk 2mo ago
The acoustics of homes with clean walls and floors can also be absolutely miserable. Some small dining rooms amplify all the worst noises and make it terrible to be in, drains your mental battery like few other things.
- theoreticalmal 2mo ago
  I’m so glad to see someone else who thinks this. Barren walls, vinyl flooring, 5k Kelvin lights, and scented candles everywhere. It’s like the most miserable consumerist environment imaginable.
  - thih9 2mo ago
    There was a reason for those popcorn ceilings and carpeted floors (and it clearly wasn't aesthetics).
  - mghackerlady 2mo ago
    A good scented candle can really help make a room feel better. Scent in general does that, though. Incense or a fireplace could also work
- 2mo ago

alehlopeh 2mo ago

The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.

pishpash 2mo ago
If anything, offices are likely designed to not feel comfortable so you are forced to focus on your screen and work. Otherwise, rooms were more comfortable than cubicles, cubicles were more comfortable than open benches, open benches will be more comfortable than whatever AI-adjacent abomination surely to come...
- skyberrys 2mo ago
  Really curious to imagine what these AI-adjacent abominations could be. Some sort of people conveyor belt we have to work on while rotating past other humans to achieve maximum 'collaboration' perhaps? Offices built into semi trucks so we get picked up and crammed together with our laptops and screens? When will it stop!

dfc 2mo ago

What design trends can be attributed to people's desire to pick up and move at a moment notice?

inigyou 2mo ago
Not having bookcases full of books, for example. My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
- nly 2mo ago
  You can...move books.

rr808 2mo ago

My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their house for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors? Edit yes I did move around in my twenties, but that stopped at 30.

Spooky23 2mo ago
Remember people marry later if at all so you break the cohort developments of growing up and adulting. I helped lead my local little league. It’s different than it used to be - it’s pretty typical to have tball parents in their 40s. A group of parents from 20s to 50s aren’t going to hang out, they don’t relate. I’m a late genx, most of my friends parents were in their 30s when I was a little leaguer. The demise of old line churches is similar. We did CYO basketball in the same parish my wife did. It’s the last of what was 8-10 catholic parishes in my city. And unlike in my youth where you had good mix multigenerational parishioners… the parish survives based on the beneficence of 5-10 people in their late 60s and 70s, with few people rising to behind them. Mainline Protestant parishes are similar. The only growth in religious communities are independent Baptists, which are great but integrate into the broader community differently, because each church mostly stands alone and isn’t part of a bigger system.
- frogperson 2mo ago
  Church groups, or at least an awful lot of them, were co-opted by groups like the Council For National Policy (parent group of the Heritage Foundation). I think a lot of younger folks see through the BS and don't want to send their time listening to hate speech discussed as gospel. These churches chose thier path, and so did their parishioners.
  - antonymoose 2mo ago
    What church(es) are you thinking of here exactly? I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life. On the contrary, most folks in the 20-40 range are tired of “cafeteria Christian” denominations that pick and chose which parts of scripture to stand by and which go ignore based on ever shifting social trends, whether it be so-called woke churches hosting drag performers or Boomer-tier Endtimes preachers that can’t stop talking about their all expense paid Israeli “pilgrimage.”

ericmay 2mo ago

> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one. 1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with. 2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?) Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.

2mo ago

mike_hock 2mo ago

The article also doesn't touch on whether visually cluttered "traditional" decor is better for people affected by those conditions. I found the office in the picture quite pleasant to look at. Not comforting and homey but suitable as a work environment.

ErroneousBosh 2mo ago

> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company! There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint. It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige. That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic. It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour. "But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?" He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.

bluGill 2mo ago
I'm told that because so many cars are the ugly gray that cars have color are selling better nowadays. It may be only a minority that want color, but that minority is willing to pay for it and they look at their choices and your car is the only one they can go for. I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
inigyou 2mo ago
I don't need to drive, luckily, but I heard that cars cost so much these days that you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible. Cars cost what shitty houses used to cost, even adjusted for inflation.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
  > you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible Why? Just buy a car, and drive it.

mgfist 2mo ago

> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did The theory I subscribe to is a few fold: 1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize 2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value 3) Thus homes stay boring and generic

ajsnigrutin 2mo ago

A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.

agumonkey 2mo ago

I see strange market forces where companies need to be trendy, so they absorb what's in the air, and then people kinda have no choice but to buy it. Nobody really wanted to but it materializes. Around me every house now has tall anthracite fully closed fences. It's gloomy as hell, streets went from cute garden with wood fences to lock-down mode in a few years. It's all the same model, all the same vibe..

nicbou 2mo ago

A home you inhabit for a long time molds to your day-to-day life. The objects you surround yourself with are not a design choice, but a series of practical solutions to everyday problems. A house becomes a home when you absent-mindedly put down your favourite teacup, and it falls on the coaster you put there five years ago. There's a pillow that makes your reading chair fit just right. The art on the walls was curated over years, and each piece means something. Modern decor is what happens when you just go on Pinterest and outsource taste for a place you don't own and don't expect to live in for long. It feels sterile because it does not represent any specific person, only an algorithmically-designed aesthetic built from off-the-shelf components. I help immigrants move to Germany, and I think that people only become Berliners when they can put their own art on the walls. It means that they finally get a sense of permanence, and have a space of their own that they want to invest in. It changes your whole perception of the city you live in.

mghackerlady 2mo ago
On the other hand, I do think selecting some things purely for design reasons makes things better. A random knicknack you don't need but fits aesthetically is good. Also, selecting things you know you need like furniture to fit a specific style is good if you the style brings you joy

qwertyuiop_ 2mo ago

Spot on ! Just watch Columbo and tell me how you feel after observing the decor. https://tubitv.com/series/300006728/columbo https://tubitv.com/series/300006728/columbo

sandworm101 2mo ago

It is old money v new money. Old money has things. If they want to go skiing, they have a set of skis in the garage and a family cabin near the slopes. If they want to go fishing, they have a boat ready on a trailer. New money isnt about having thing but having power to acquire, to congure up things as needed. New money doesn't own skis. New money rents them. New money doesnt have a boat parked behind thier garage, they have an empty (minimalist) garage and will buy a boat a month before the trip, having it delivered to the lake by someone who owns work gloves. Old money collects a household of things over decades. New money leaves a trail of discarded junk that was used once and disposed of shortly thereafter.

_the_inflator 2mo ago

I agree with you. Victimhood par excellence: "My brain is a 200+ IQ machine desperately waiting for input. However, I cannot feed it! It is the walls, I guess." It should be legally enforced to place every author's smartphone usage statistics into such articles. No interior design on earth can compensate for 40 hours TikTok usage per week. And we didn't mention other streaming services as well. It might be the smartphone usage as well as time spend.

INTPenis 2mo ago

Depends on your perspective. Yes I grew up with that type of decor, but it doesn't comfort me today because all I can think of are all the knocks and crannies where dust and pollen doesn't get cleaned out of.

ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago

Even those homes these days are all LED that flicker during saccades.

glimshe 2mo ago

I feel the opposite. I find old homes heavy, cluttered (as you said) and oppressive. I love clean and modern environments.

KoolKat23 2mo ago

I've come to realize clutter makes me anxious. This is a quite common for people. Sadly I still own lots of shit.