Your Home Belongs to Renovation TV - The Atlantic - 0 views
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HGTV is regularly a top-five cable channel—and its growing popularity has coincided with a huge increase in actual renovations. In the 1990s, American homeowners spent an average of more than $90 billion annually on remodeling their homes. By 2020, it was more than $400 billion
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For homeowners, pressure to keep up with the Joneses has reached a logical extreme. Everywhere you look, there are new reasons to be unhappy with your house, and new trends you can follow to fix it.
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Annetta Grant, a professor at Bucknell University who studies the home-renovation market, recently co-authored an ethnography on how home-reno media has changed people’s relationship to their home. She and her fellow researcher, Jay Handelman, conducted extensive interviews with 17 people in the process of renovating their home, attended a consumer-renovation expo, interviewed renovation-service providers, and consumed dozens of hours and hundreds of pages of home-reno media.
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The primary finding was that home-renovation media seems to make people feel uneasy in their own home. In academic terms, the phenomenon is known as dysplacement, or a sense that our long-held understanding of what our home means to us is out of sync with what changing market forces have decided a home should be. In layman’s terms, it’s the unsettling feeling that the home you’ve made for yourself is no longer a good one, and that other people think less of you for it.
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People are highly sensitive to feeling out-of-sorts in their home, Grant told me. This is one of the reasons that moving and unpacking are so stressful, and that accumulating unnecessary clutter feels so bothersome.
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Americans have long understood successful home ownership and homemaking as indicative of personal success and character. Beginning in the postwar era, “that was largely achieved by customizing your home to the personality that you wanted to portray,”
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Even in the tract-home developments of mid-century suburbs, the insides of houses tended to be idiosyncratic, with liberal use of color and texture and pattern—on the walls, the floors, the furniture. Some of those choices were the result of trends, of course, but there was plenty of variety within those parameters, and people tended to pick things they liked and stick with them
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Now, however, “personalization is being ripped out of people’s homes” in favor of market-pleasing standardization,
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, Grant said that people expressed embarrassment at having friends over to their outdated home, so much so that they’d avoid hosting their book club or planning parties—precisely the kinds of happy occasions that your home is supposed to be for.
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The goal of this media apparatus, Grant said, isn’t to provide knowledge and inspiration for people improving the country’s aging housing stock but to keep people engaged in a process of constant updating—discarding old furniture and fixtures and appliances and buying new ones in much the way many people now cycle through an endless stream of fast-fashion pieces, trying to live up to standards that they can never quite pin down, and therefore never quite satisfy