22/2025: A home for living.

Image © Jose 2025

I was bit by the minimalism bug as a young designer, but I never got infected. I grew up looking at all those magazines of manicured objects, indoors, solutions, but it’s not that I couldn’t replicate them, I always succumbed to the practical side in me, to having things in reach, to having them visible if that meant some level of chaos. I understood very early that there was a moment for those photos – typically the indoor ones – that very limited gap between when things are done/built/renovated, and when human beings walk in to live the space.

I don’t like chaos, those around me know I have quite a bit of OCD in me, there are even jokes in the family on how organized my closet is. I also don’t like too much stuff, I feel houses need some empty/white space to let things breathe, to let things have a voice. I tend to look at a house as a frame for those that live in it, and it must allow human beings to be whoever they are. I have walked unannounced into homes and seen there are people capable of living their picture-perfect life, but in general, a house will reflect people: imperfect, unruly, in constant change.

I realize I might be placing too many things in the same bag: modernism, which is an aesthetic and historical movement with many expressions in art, architecture, design, and minimalism, which came out of that movement as a reaction to the ornamentation and clutter of previous years. The “less is more” from Mies van der Rohe somehow evolved into “less is bore” as less became bare, stripped of human contact and emotion.

I know there are reasons behind why these magazines (and Instagram, and Pinterest) have this minimalist approach to imagery, sometimes it’s all about image clarity (simple spaces make stronger images), sometimes about understanding how people want to escape real life (aesthetic therapy), and sometimes it’s really about how trendy it is.

In the last ten or so years we have been seeing a shift, maybe not a movement per se, more of a counter-trend, of portraying spaces full of life, people and their trinkets, the mundane mixed with the eclectic, the layered impact of use and abuse on spaces, on things, this along with the stories of people and how they live the space they’re in. I am much closer to this type of philosophy, and while I could not live in so many of those spaces, I see the people, I read their history, and I understand their space, their choices.

As we are turning our house into a home, we are adding things by nature, since when we walked in there was nothing. We have two almost full houses of stuff from different stages of our lives, and we kept a lot of what was in the house when we bought it. While we are trying to buy the least possible new stuff, we end up buying some. So, we are quickly going from bare walls and floors to a reality that can quickly become overcrowded with stuff.

We placed a lot of this stuff in the basement and now we are bringing it up to the space, things, almost one by one, as we see the need for it. Sometimes it’s not a piece of furniture, it’s a hook on that wall behind the door for the aprons, it’s a set of hooks in that wall because we need a place to hang our jackets, it’s a side table at that end of the sofa for us to set the coffee mug. But it is a fragile process, suddenly you step back and you see it, you feel it, the room and space is no longer breathing. We cluttered the space, many times out of habit (I always place the mug there when I am sitting at the sofa).

Our home will probably never fit in any interior design magazine, not even the ones I mention, at least not until we live in it for a while. Right now, it still feels like a house in transition to a home, a home that is our home, carrying the legacy we both have, as well as the legacy of the previous owner. Until these things can connect and relate in space, until they allow us to live the space with fluidity, with room to grow and to create new memories, it won’t feel right. And maybe this is my OCD speaking, and might even be a contradiction in itself, since a space speaks of the moment when it is seen, and this is the moment we are in.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the trick isn’t to make a space fit a philosophy, but to let it breathe with us, evolve with us, fall in and out of balance. A home isn’t a final shot, it’s a long exposure. And for now, this is what’s in the frame.