This Space for Rent

Arts and Crafts? I don’t think so, Cisco!

pluck your eyes out, Martha, it's the invasion of the postmodernists!

Due to being insufficiently pious in earlier lives, I find myself cursed with an increasingly strong obsession that tells me that I! Must! Built! A! House! From! Scratch! before I die (or get too old to manhandle 2x10 girders up to the second story of a house.) One of the spinoffs of this obsession is that I occasionally buy modern design magazines so I can get some idea of how I'm going to lay out and decorate the inside of the so-far-hypothetical maison des rêves idiots (don't laugh; occasionally you can find magazines that actually show the interior of the house instead of the huge heaps of expensive junk that the self-proclaimed architecture writers feel is necessary to show that a house is indeed of a superior design. It's the same sort of logic that leads to the syndrome where you'll find, tucked away in the very best neighborhoods, houses that are so ugly and awkward that you have trouble even starting to find something that you can point at to say "look, that feature just makes no sense on a house like this.")

But, of course, for a design magazines to make a living, it's got to sell a lot of advertising. And some of the magazines aren't very particular about the advertising as long as they can fill up column inches with revenue-generating copy.

Take this (admittedly terrible) scanned image that I pulled out of a two page ad at the start of an (unnamed, sorry) magazine that's aimed at Arts & Crafts, Craftsman, Prairie Style, and fellow traveller design schools. The ad copy around this image prominently mentions Arts & Crafts and goes on for several paragraphs about the way fine furniture was made before my grandparents came along and spoiled the fun. But then they show this picture.

I'm sure that there are A&C counters that have obelisk-style legs. And I'm sure that there are A&C counters that have ornamental wooden braces to help support the edges of the countertop. And I'm sure that, at least once in a fever dream, Morris put tiny decorative braces around the top of a table (and then took a hatchet to the table the next morning when he saw what it looked like in full light.) But to put ALL OF THEM on the same counter?

It's something. It's not Arts & Crafts, but it's something. It's sort of like something Richardson would have done if he'd lived to be 140 years old and was able to participate in a Romanesque backlash against the modernist curse of the Prairie Style. This counter is noisy, it's cluttered, and it's sloppily modern (the countertop looks like it's either a big slab of Barre granite or a chunk of one of those countertop plastics) in a way that does not give any credit to any of the designs that it sloppily takes from.

It might be happy in a Gehry building or one of those "too much money to afford to hire a good architect" McMansions, but you'd need to be Oscar Wilde to get away with putting it into your bungalow.