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In the new Netflix horror series The Observer, which follows a family as a stalker turns their new suburban dream home into a nightmare, the first boogie the viewer encounters is the home’s Carrara marble countertops. By all accounts, the house is an immaculate fantasy home at the time of purchase, and its new owners had to empty their savings and investment accounts to fend off rival bidders and afford the final price. But the family finds the house’s gleaming white Italian countertops so offensive—so five years ago— that they take out an additional loan to get rid of them immediately.
The series verges on the absurd—in a bit of uninspired casting, Jennifer Coolidge plays an aggressively divorced New Jersey real estate agent driving a Mercedes—but the family’s immediate desire to renovate an already lovely home is played completely straight. And for good reason: real people do this all the time now. They do it on HGTV training shows, on social media, in publications like Domino and Live it up and Architectural Digest. On real estate TV, brokers and buyers cringe and sulk at dark cabinetry and shiny brass fixtures and appliances, all holdovers from bygone trends. Houses with idiosyncrasies or personality—or even just somewhat dated but easily changed design elements like a red accent wall—are mocked mercilessly, only to be turned into pristine, camera-ready monuments to sterility. Often, transformations involve explicit calculations of how much is theoretically added to a home’s potential market value.
Some of the featured homes do need renovations and upgrades to make them livable homes, but the messages of aesthetic trends and social acceptability that come with all this renovation run much deeper than that. Reno media is incredibly popular—HGTV is regularly in the top five cable channels—and its growing popularity has coincided with a huge increase in actual renovations. In the 1990s, American homeowners spent an average of over $90 billion a year remodeling their homes. By 2020, it is over $400 billion. For homeowners, the 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 them.
A home plays two main roles for many people: it’s where you live your everyday life, and it’s the most important asset you’ll ever own. Housing has served these dual purposes for most of the country’s history, but in the last 50 years in particular, as rising home values have far outpaced wage growth, Americans have begun to stake even more of their financial future on their home . If you’re one of the nearly two-thirds of adults in this country who own a home, it’s highly likely that its potential sale price is a major factor in your long-term financial stability, even if you don’t plan to sell anytime soon.
In theory, renewal is a way to maintain this stability. America is not building enough new homes to keep up with housing demand, and homes built during the housing boom of decades past must be maintained, even if their owners have no desire to make any aesthetic changes. Old houses spring leaks. Mice come in and chew the cables. Vinyl flooring and laminate countertops are scraped and peeled. So people get to work, learn about kitchen backsplash options and find out which walls are load-bearing, and sift through an endless sea of contractors to keep their house up to date, hoping to someday attract prospective buyers in the process.
In this context, the creation and growth of businesses like HGTV, Live it up, and Home Depot in the 1990s and 2000s makes perfect sense: By then, many of the homes built during the postwar suburban expansion of the 1950s and 60s had been sold to new owners and needed little work. While you’re opening walls and tearing up floors, why not make some other upgrades? Over time, popular shows such as Upper retainer and Brothers Properties took that ethos to the extreme, doing on-screen math to show viewers how much money some strategic renovations could theoretically make them in the long run. Anyone who dips even a toe into the home improvement market will quickly encounter assurances that, say, an open kitchen or spa-like bathroom will not only pay off, but may very well turn a profit on your investment by maximizing the value of your property. If your home is the financial foundation on which your life is built, then no making these changes is just leaving money on the table. If you don’t, a home fin will and they will make all the profit. Don’t you wish you could retire?
If you buy at the right price, make the right crowd-pleasing changes, keep your budget low, and have a little luck, some renovations will really pay for themselves and beyond – that’s the whole principle of flipping. But thanks in large part to the ubiquity of shelter media, this way of thinking about our homes now animates the behavior of many people, regardless of whether they’re looking to sell their home quickly. Julia Miller, an interior designer who owns Yond Interiors in Minneapolis, told me that her middle-income clients almost always choose to renovate because they’ve saved money to address real, functional issues in their home while making aesthetic changes at the same time. two birds with one stone. While the contractors are there and the house is a barely livable mess and the money is saved for what is usually a once-in-a-lifetime project for these clients, they want to make the most of it. However, the process can be painful. These clients tend to consume a lot of home design media and become overwhelmed trying to make all the perfect decisions, Miller said, eventually losing sight of whether they even like the actual updates they want. “They see too much and then they don’t believe themselves,” she told me. “Many of them come to us feeling paralyzed.”
For Miller’s wealthier clients, it’s easier. They’re more likely to renovate just because they want their home to be completely tailored to their personal preferences, she said, and the money it takes to make that happen isn’t their main concern — nor is resale fully recouping that investment. But with less affluent clients, Miller told me, a significant part of her job is encouraging them to step away from HGTV, Instagram, and Pinterest to figure out what they can actually enjoy once they have to live in the home. in which I create.
New research has begun to show that the connection Miller observed between these clients and shelter media is not merely anecdotal. Annette Grant, a professor at Bucknell University who studies the home renovation market, recently co-authored an ethnography on how home-renovation media has changed how people feel about their home. She and her fellow researcher, Jay Handelman, conducted extensive interviews with 17 people in the process of renovating their homes, attended a consumer renovation expo, interviewed renovation service providers, and devoured dozens of hours and hundreds of pages of home Reno media. The main finding was that home improvement media seemed to make people feel uneasy in their own home. In academic terms, the phenomenon is known as displacement, or the sense that our long-held understanding of what our home means to us is out of sync with what changing market forces have decided home should be. In layman’s terms, it’s the unsettling feeling that the home you’ve made for yourself is no longer good, and that other people think less of you because of it.
People are very sensitive to feeling out of place in their home, Grant told me. This is one of the reasons why moving and unpacking can be so stressful, and that the accumulation of unnecessary clutter feels so annoying. Americans have long understood successful home ownership and housekeeping as an indicator of personal success and character. Beginning in the post-war era, “this was accomplished largely by customizing your home to the personality you wanted to portray,” Grant said. Even in mid-century suburban housing developments, house interiors tend to be idiosyncratic, with liberal use of color, texture and pattern – on walls, floors, furniture. Some of these choices were the result of trends, of course, but there was a lot of variation in these parameters, and people tended to pick things they liked and stick with them. Can you imagine your grandmother worrying that her decades-old chintz curtains or Harvest Gold appliances are out of date?
Now, however, “customization is being ripped out of people’s homes” in favor of standardization that satisfies the market, Grant said. In her interviews with homeowners doing renovations, Grant said people expressed discomfort with having friends over in their aging home, to the point that they would avoid organizing their book club or planning parties—just the happy types. occasions your home is supposed to be for. Others worried that if they spent money to create the home they actually wanted — if they sacrificed a bedroom or bathroom to change the layout, for example, or didn’t knock down enough walls to create an open floor plan — they would be penalized by buyers down the line. It’s a type of worry common enough that it was recently the subject of a New York Times real estate advice column.
The lifestyle media that define a successful household have been around for generations, but the speed at which trends and expectations are now changing, combined with the sheer scale of changes now expected of homeowners, is something fundamentally new. The purpose of this media apparatus, Grant said, is not to provide knowledge and inspiration to the people who are improving the country’s aging housing stock, but to keep people engaged in a process of constant renovation—disposing of old furniture and fixtures and appliances and buying new ones. in almost the way that many people now navigate through an endless stream of fast fashion items, trying to live up to standards they can never quite define and therefore never fully satisfy. If you’re required to plan your financial future and your most personal spaces around how much strangers might be willing to pay for your home one day, then your home isn’t really yours, even if you’re the one with the right keys now. You may own it, but so does lifestyle media and the housing market.
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