Sharon March 10th, 2009
This week’s AIP class will focus on home systems - heating, cooling, cooking, hygeine, cleaning, water etc… I’ve written about most of these systems in the last class. So today I wanted to start with something that doesn’t usually get classed as an essential home system, but, IMHO, might be if you are planning on staying in place - beauty.
I realize that this may sound nuts to some people, who are trying simply to get to the basics in place - the idea that I might suggest you make it aesthetically pleasing, when you are just trying to get the landlord to agree to a compost pile might seem a little nuts.
And yet, think about how you react to beautiful spaces - the deep release of breath that beauty brings to most of us. Think about how much of what we’re doing involves going home and staying there - shouldn’t we also enjoy it? Moreover, I think that beauty is one of the ways we have of selling the “simple life” (a term I loathe, but ok) - that is, many of our aesthetic visions for our homes are based upon functional ideas of beauty - the Shaker or country aesthetic, for example. They mimic lives of great functionality that are beautiful precisely because they are functional - only the design elements are empty - because they do not contain the basic utility that underlied the real Shaker’s aesthetics, or the real country kitchen.
The problem with beauty is that we’ve been told for a long, long time that aesthetics are the product of our “personal style” which involves the project of putting together mass produced commercial objects in such a way as to articulate our personal, tiny variation on the range of mass produced aesthetics available to us. That is, we can be “country” or we can be “modern” or “shaker” or “retro” but one way or another, we have a limited range of options, ones carefully dictated to us by tv, books, design magazines. And again, these have nothing to do with our actual lives as they are lived.
Now despite being an innate slob, I’m not at all immune to this - I find the pretty pictures in magazines as enticing as anyone else. When we were working on the house addition, I found myself gravitating to the design books in the library. But while I was whisked away by certain visions, I also noticed some things about them. For example, have you noticed that unless they are showing a modernist media room, there’s never, ever a tv in the pictures of fancy household spaces? Again, unless you are seeing a super modernist or explicitly retro kitchen, or an ad for a particular small appliance, have you noticed that there’s never a regular plastic toaster or blender on the counter of the dream kitchens? If a toaster does show up, it will be a fancy stainless steel one, or a 1950s original in perfect condition, and either way, cost as much as a cross-country flight.
This, of course, is because plastic is ugly, and so are many of the accoutrements of modern life. That is, there’s no way to make a tv beautiful, so you don’t have them in pictures of beautiful homes. Toasters mostly aren’t pretty, so when the people come to shoot the fancy home (of wealthy people with no children, generally 
), the toaster goes under the sink, where it does not ordinarily reside. And this isn’t just cleaning up for the photographers - the net effect of everyone hiding the actual realities of daily living (how often do bathroom spreads even show a toilet ) is that we are given an image of beauty at home that most of us could never achieve. Not only does it require wealth, but it requires that you not live in your house - even the fossil fueled version of our lives are rendered beautiful by never having any actual needs met by the home. The home becomes, then, merely a repository of your cash. It never returns anything but beauty - and that only if you don’t go the bathroom, eat or sleep and mess up the forty layers of decorative pillows on the bed (What on earth do people do with these when they actually sleep? Where do they go without making a giant mess? I’m just asking .)
But what if we could come up with a vision of beauty that actually didn’t require us to hide the realities of our lives in the closet whenever anyone comes over? That’s the beauty I long for - one that doesn’t disappear the first time I make breakfast or the kids tromp into the house - lasting beauty that lasts more than two seconds, and feeds our need for grace and peace all the time, rather than once in a while.
And that means a new relationship to our stuff. Because most of the stuff we own and use isn’t beautiful - and it can’t be made beautiful. Try and look at a parking lot full of cars and say “oh, how breathtaking!” Yeah, right. Seriously, there is no such thing as a pretty car (although a some are uglier than others) - because a sweep of them is nothing but butt ugly. Yes, manufacturers can try and make one car look ok, with a half-naked woman and an expanse of mountains, but it is the woman and the mountains that are attractive. And when the photographers come to take pictures of your yard, bet you a million bucks they want the car out of the driveway to make things look pretty. If it doesn’t show up often in magazine photos, you can bet it is probably ugly.
Which means that a beautiful home means making sure that your daily tasks are done with things that look nice to you - not with hiding the evidence of your actual life before people come over. And for me, and my personal aesthetics (others may differ) the shift to a human-powered, manual life does a lot improve my aesthetic situation. Old things that are well made enough to have survived to be passed down to me are more beautiful than newer ones, and if they were well made, will often last a lot longer, which is another factor in beauty. Things made of natural materials are often more beautiful than things made of plastic. Good tools look beautiful in many cases, as well as being beautiful.
Moreover, this life I live requires that I not have to hunt under the sink every time I want a piece of toast. Beautiful isn’t a picture you take once - it is something you want to live in, like a fish in water. No one invites guests over and says “here, come look at the one moment the house was pretty.”
The tools I’m finding for a beauty I can live with are cleanliness (not my strong suit, but I’m working on it), space for the reality of our lives (ie, finding a way to either reduce our clutter or increase our organization or both, so that things fit into the spaces for them), and tools that are both beautiful and useful. If I can’t find a beautiful version of something, perhaps that’s clue to me that maybe I should begin thinking of ways to replace it with something that is beautiful.
The more my life moves towards utility, the more my home becomes the space in which I work and live, and thus, the space that serves my present and actual needs, the better I like it. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things about my house I think are ugly (the pink tile in one bathroom’s days are numbered, since I manage to scavenge some less hideous tile), or that I wouldn’t change, or things that aren’t better fixed with a can of paint (that’s worth doing while you can too - nothing worse than walking into a room and thinking “gack!” every day), but gradually I’m finding that as a consequence of designing a home to work with less or no power, and to meet the actual needs of my family, it looks more beautiful.
We took the fridge out of my kitchen. I’m not perfectly immune to the lure of those all-steel ones, but since we didn’t use it anymore, we simply took it out, and used the space to build in shelves and a permanent place for my grain grinder. It looks a lot better than the plastic-sheathed white fridge used to. Again, I noticed when I read design magazines at the doctor’s office that the only fridges I saw were those stainless ones in the perfect modernist kitchens, all white, all pure, all perfect. But I only know one person who actually owns one of those - so most of us start hosed when it comes to meeting standard conceptions of beauty. The only hope is to change them altogether.
I suspect that difficult times may put my family in our home even more than we live in it now, that our options for pleasure activities may become more and more “visiting people in their homes and them coming to us” - which to me means that it is important to consider aesthetics - I do not mean this in the sense of investing lots of money in expensive beauty. But cheap beauty is cheap. A can of paint is not so terribly expensive. Old things, used things, free things are often beautiful - or can be made that way with small investments. A functional home, designed for work and pleasure, tidy but lived in, is beautiful in many cases simply because it is. And that’s something we can work towards - the unification of our forms and our new and necessary functions.
Sharon