There's a disturbing trend in home decor marketing, and its spread beyond just The Pottery Barn. In the past 15 years, stores like the Pot Barn, etc have begun convincing Americans that they need more furniture to store the vases and over-sized LETTERS that they purchase at the decor store, and thus, new furniture must be designed to hold these nonsense items that only serve to convince the consumer they have a personality. "Look at all my candle sticks, reproduction telephones and balls made of wicker!" Theses knick-knacks and the furniture that store them bother me just about as much as the concept of people buying art at Bed, Bath and Beyond.
But it's one thing to brainwash us into thinking we need mudroom benches when we don't even know what a mudroom is, but it's another, when you take something as real and functional as a bookcase, and deconstruct it's purpose to being soley decorative. The photos here are from more than one magazine, and all employ the gimic of turning books page-side out so that you see a nice wash of yellowed, ivory paper bricks on the shelf, instead of book titles. This is INSANE!!!! If bookshelves, and more so, books, now serve only decorative functions, what's left, wall-mounted toilets?
And It's not that I'm against knick-knacks. I practically AM a knick-knack. It's the idea of buying them on a mass-produced level so that everyone has the same "vintage" wine poster and tiny bicycle sculpture on their wine rack that holds backwards books instead of wine bottles. Get a personality, people! Don't let the catalogues tell you it's pretty to turn your books backward, and that bookshelves are merely headboards for your bed! This, my friends, is why I pick artwork up off the street and furnish my room with rusty railroad nails. I will not be brainwashed! (though I think the backward-books as ivory paper bricks is kind of appealing to the eye. Curse you evil POT BARN!!)
7 comments:
you're not a knick-knack!!!
but a wall-mounted toilet... now that's an idea...
you know, i guess we guys call them urinals. highly decorative. you should go for it.
I'm so corrected.
though, it wouldn't be a far step for me incorporating a urinal into my home decor, so long as i found it in some historic demolition sight or something. I do love adaptive re-use!
As a teenager I really wanted to turn a disused toilet into a flower pot. I used to enviously eye the toilets at that overpriced outdoor vintage furniture store on Houston. Not sure where the impulse orginally came from, but it still appeals.
knick knack paddy wack
throw pottery barn a bone....
do you think they're worried about paying royalties?
No, I just think they're uncreative idiots. Someone probably did it on "Trading Spaces" and they copied it.
I love that this post became more about how we feel about toilets, than whatever it was i was talking about. I'm not being sarcastic.
I recently had the experience of moving the belongings out of a deceased relative's home, and I learned an important truth: "STUFF" IS PARASITIC. We don't need "stuff", "stuff" needs us. In fact, it depends on us for its very existence. And, like any good parasite, it repays us for our kindness by sucking the blood from our wallets and clogging our homes until we don't have room for the things we really value (books, hamsters, small children, wall-mounted toilets, etc.).
Hi Nathan! How did you find me. So nice to hear from you, even if its sort of depressing facts about life.
sorry you lost someone recently.
Post a Comment