Late summer re-run: This is whack!
This post ran at the beginning on 15 August 2008. In keeping with my "weekends are for antique posts" test, I'm going for walks it once more.
I had a conversation with a client yesterday and I was trying to explain to her that the images of glamorous kitchens she sees in catalogs and magazines aren't real places. For the most part, those images are sets in a studio or on a sound stage. As fully-designed sets, their reason for existence is to sell you something, not to act as a template for what your life should look like. I hear that same sort of thing a lot; "make my house look like the one in As Good As It Gets" or "I want this to look like a Pottery Barn catalog." It's a strange, internalized kind of consumerism. One where it's not enough to want the goods for sale, rather the goal seems to be the acquisition of the advertiser's whole imaginary universe. It shows up for me in requests from people who think they want to live in a magazine spread or in a model home. Newsflash: no one actually lives in a model home and that magazine spread is peddling a fantasy.
Real life is messy but it's also a lot of fun. My goal as I set out design a space for someone is to minimize the messy part of life and accentuate the fun parts. Clean up should be simple. Everything should have a place that's easy to get to. Rooms should be furnished and accessorized with things that reflect the lives of their owners. I want the art on the walls to be art you like and that you pick out. I want the photos on the book case to be your photos. I want the stuff that's lying around to tell a story about your life. It's your house, not Arthur Rutenberg's and not Pottery Barn's and not mine.
Anyhow, as I was ruminating about that I came across something on Consumerist that may be the root of why I approach residential design the way that I do.
Buried on their web page become a brief mention of some thing they have been calling Wacky Packages. Well, I don't forget them as Wacky Packs and for higher or for worse, my layout sensibilities were deeply tormented by them after I changed into 9 or so.
Wacky Packages were a collectible sticker series that were put out by Topps (the baseball card people) in the '70s. They were graphic, sophomoric, brilliant spoofs of consumer products and my brothers and I couldn't get enough of them. The mention in Consumerist alluded to their value as collectibles now and there's actually a website dedicated to buying and selling them. What does that have to do with making a house reflect the people who live in it? Hold that thought.
This is a picture of my mother inside the kitchen of my youth home in approximately 1973. Looming at the back of her is a cupboard door included with, you guessed it, Wacky Packs.
My mother, bless her heart, allowed her six sons to cover a cabinet door in her kitchen with Wacky Packs. It's an excessive example, but there may be no question that the house I grew up in reflected the truth that nine people lived in it. Seven children are difficult to overlook first of all; however just if you did, take a look at out this cupboard door! Thank you Mom for placing up with us, thank you Tom for getting us started with Wacky Packs, thanks Steve for scanning all of these old own family images and thank you Consumerist for the stroll down reminiscence lane.
Here are a bunch of authentic difficulty Wacky Packs, many of which had been on that cabinet door. They mock the Cold War, they mock hippies, they're decidedly irreverent and gloriously offensive. They are aimed squarely at 9-year-antique boys, but they encompass a few heavy allusions to cigarettes and liquor. I can not recover from how lots of these things I keep in mind, but I haven't given them a concept in at least 30 years.
Now I doubt that I'll be encouraging someone cover a kitchen cabinet door with stickers any time soon, but if any individual surely desires to; what's it going to harm?