This is whack
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 page changed into a quick mention of some thing they had been calling Wacky Packages. Well, I consider them as Wacky Packs and for higher or for worse, my design sensibilities have been deeply laid low with them once I changed into nine 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 photo of my mother in the kitchen of my formative years home in about 1973. Looming in the back of her is a cupboard door protected with, you guessed it, Wacky Packs.
My mom, bless her heart, allowed her six sons to cowl a cupboard door in her kitchen with Wacky Packs. It's an excessive instance, but there may be no doubt that the house I grew up in meditated the fact that 9 humans lived in it. Seven children are difficult to overlook first of all; however simply in case you did, take a look at out this cabinet door! Thank you Mom for putting up with us, thank you Tom for getting us began with Wacky Packs, thank you Steve for scanning all of those old circle of relatives images and thank you Consumerist for the walk down memory lane.
Here are a group of unique difficulty Wacky Packs, a lot of which have been on that cupboard door. They mock the Cold War, they mock hippies, they may be decidedly irreverent and gloriously offensive. They are aimed squarely at nine-yr-vintage boys, but they include a few heavy allusions to cigarettes and liquor. I cannot recover from how lots of these things I do not forget, but I haven't given them a concept in at least 30 years.
Now I doubt that I'll be encouraging a person cover a kitchen cabinet door with stickers any time soon, but if somebody surely wants to; what's it going to harm?