Kitchens and Kitsch Outs

[steepholm]

A little while ago I put this photograph on Facebook:



I'd been idling next to a kitchen shop, and on the van parked outside there was a Before and After picture of their work. To be perfectly honest, neither is much to my taste, but still, as I said on FB, I couldn't see why After was better than Before, or why anyone would spend significant sums to change from one to the other.

On FB some agreed, some demurred. One person suggested that the Before picture was dated. This may be true, but it's not a word I've really ever understood. Is 2018 not also a date?

Attitudes to the past are astoundingly inconsistent, of course. I often wish I'd photographed the jar of Tesco pasta sauce I once bought that boasted, on different parts of the same label, both of its "New Improved Recipe" and its "Traditional, Authentic Taste" - but similar examples abound. In the case of houses, it seems to me that there is a clear divide between different rooms. No one walks into a living room with an original Elizabethan fireplace and oak beams and complains that it is "dated," although once they might have. On the contrary, they'll praise its atmosphere and take good care of its original features. Kitchens, and to a lesser extent bathrooms, are a different matter. But then, even within bathrooms, a stand-alone Victorian, cast-iron lion-foot bath is an enviable item, as long as it's plumbed in; a Victorian water closet, not so much. This was where British hills in Fukushima jibbed, I remember, not quite being able to bring itself to install an authentic British toilet, despite having sent to England for all the other fittings:



Contrast Dreamton, which won out in the bathroom authenticity stakes. I don't appear to have captured it, but I think the toilet there was even operated by a chain, which took me back to my childhood:



(My main memory of the chain in the first house I lived in is that it was too high to reach, so my father added a loop of wire to the bottom - wire thin and sharp enough to cut cheese, or so it seemed to me as I dangled from the end of it by my thin fingers.)

Anyway, the bifurcation of attitudes regarding different rooms, and the desirability or otherwise of modernness in them, has led to a lot of temporal inconsistency within houses. Happily my own small house, here in the orphans' graveyard, was only built in 2006, so it's not something I need to worry about. Everything is magnolia but the mould.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Our kitchen gets ripped out and refitted with something more in keeping come January :o)

I can't wait to see the back of that $%^&! IKEA!

[calimac]

A couple decades ago, at least around here, the "before" and "after" would have been reversed. Antiseptic white was old and boring, a relic of the 1950s; grained wood was colorful and exciting and in touch with nature or some such thing. Now I guess they're reversed. Again, since the 1950s style had been in reaction to what was considered grotty old stuff.

[steepholm]

The Zeitgeist is far too arbitrary to consider spending actual money on.

[calimac]

You certainly don't see me doing it. I remain baffled at obsessive kitchen remodeling in particular. Though there can be legitimate reasons: the ones with genuinely antiquated and dubiously-functioning equipment, or the friend who lives in a motorized wheelchair and needed a remodel to be able to get around her kitchen.

[steepholm]

I remodelled my own kitchen this year, in fact, but only to increase its size - which doubled after I took out the downstairs toilet. Now more than one person can be in it at a time! And I have a serving hatch to the dining room, so I don't feel so isolated in there. (I suspect serving hatches are deeply unfashionable, but haven't bothered to check.)

[colorwheel]

i've noticed this for years on the house hunters family of shows (do you have those?). these shows claim to be reality tv but are by far the most deceptive of anything in that genre, though that's not my point here. my point is, as people tour the houses and comment on whether they like them, a frequent comment is that the decor is "dated." the term is used as a negative, of course, but it's so far divorced from the speaker that it functions as an objective negative almost like math. you would never know from the use of this term that humans have different taste in house decor at all; it sounds as if something simply is or is not dated, and does or does not need "updating." binary and objective.

the house hunters family of shows is terrible. many of us watch it anyway. not for the (fake) narrative, but because we like to see the inside of houses.

[steepholm]

I've not seen that show, although we have similar ones. And yes, "dated" (or indeed "unfashionable" as applied to clothes) is a concept I just don't get - or rather, I can only understand it as a kind of commodity fetish designed to encourage people to spend more and use up the planet's resources faster.