Design Within Reach has lost its anal-retentive mind.

I love Design Within Reach. It simplifies everything. There is no clutter in the design or in the process of shopping for good design, and I aspire to the clutter-free, utterly simple beauty that has been its concept all these years.

But then, suddenly, I get the new catalogue, and it's all changed! Somebody must have decided that the simplicity was off-putting, sterile, too challenging, or — what? — insufficiently hygge.

Here's the main photo on the front page right now:



What's all that crap on the tables? I'm supposed to infer the existence of people? People with beverages. I appreciate that these glasses — even with ice cubes — are not dripping with the condensation that plagues ordinary humans who might feel challenged by the erstwhile crystal cleanness of DWR, but still. What chaos! And are those matches on and next to the white plate? Is there smoking going on? Where are these people going to put the pits from all those olives in that bowl? Why is there a plant pot on the books? And what are those books? "How to Decorate with Plants"?

I made up that book title. The topic How to Decorate with Plants plagued me back in the 1970s when I had the job (in marketing research) of writing code numbers on all the articles in an endless stream of magazines. There was a number for interior decoration and a number for plants, and we had to pick one, and then — having picked one — stick to the same code number when the topic came up again. Decorating with plants kept coming up. It turned out to be a big women's magazine topic circa 1975, but we kept forgetting which code number we'd assigned to that first decorating-with-plants article, and it wasn't easy digging up what we only vaguely remembered. Was it in House & Garden or House Beautiful or Better Homes and Gardens? Or was it in one of the women's magazines? Ladies Home Journal or Woman's Day or Family Circle or Good Housekeeping.... We had stacks of those magazines, real paper magazines, on actual shelves. Fortunately, we didn't have to search for the code for the original decorating with sheets article. Decorating with sheets was also a big topic of the time, but there was no code for sheets, because sheets weren't thought of back when the code numbers were devised in the 1940s or 50s. But in the 70s, when manufacturers kept coming up with new colorful patterns, magazine editors kept coming up with new ideas for how to use sheets — drape them over tables, reconfigure them into curtains, and (most importantly) staple them to walls. The decorating with sheets articles all got 1140 (or whatever the interior decoration code was). That made it easy, but I still had to look at that madness.

Do you see why I loved the old Design Within Reach catalog, the one without the clutter?

Let's do one more photo from the new DWR:



Madness! Pens on the chair. One pen is even uncapped. Backpack on the floor (as if DWR is pleading with us to believe that their furniture is compatible with the harboring of children). And charging a mobile phone! Have we ever before even seen an electrical outlet before in a DWR photograph? Here is an outlet with the wire stretched across in the way of getting to the chair. And the wire isn't white, which I think means that the phone is not an iPhone. The heresy is raging. Madness!

"See? You can be messy on the inside, and no one knows."

Step inside a 400-square-foot apartment space, transformed by elaborate built-ins:



The quote I've used for the post title appears about midway and marks the spot where my mood began to shift from delight to despair. What do we think of this man, who is promoting what seems to be a simplified, de-cluttered way of life, but who is, himself, in a business, promoting expensive merchandise, the machinery of compression. Do we want to be compressed thusly? It's one thing to live like this on board a cruise ship, but permanently? For a certain type of person — perhaps this man, or the man he pretends to be — it's a fine, joyful existence. Would he ever really have a dinner party for 10 in this space, as we see enacted at the end? It's not a real party, because it's an on-camera demonstration of the space. Watch closely and notice how the women are responding. There is something they do not love, and it is visible even in this crisply edited production. I felt empathy with these women and resistance to the man's sales pitch. And I remembered the gutted space shown at the beginning of the video, and thought that I could be happy, living in SoHo, in that 400-square-foot space as it looks right then. Just do the kitchen and the bathroom, nice and modern and constrained into a modest space, and let me put in some normal furniture — a good-sized table near the window for my work and eating space (that can be cleared off if anyone needs to come over for dinner) and I'll order a sleeper sofa from Design Within Reach. Spare me all those insane, ever-encroaching built-ins, and those crazy pop-up extra beds for guests. Guests to the city can get a hotel room or sleep on the floor or I'll add sleeper chair. By the end of the video, I felt paranoid that the government had a plan to shift us into smaller and smaller pods with evil corporations getting rich fitting them out with soul crushing storage bins. Mayor Bloomberg! Who fixed your ducts? Huh? Fixed your ducts, all right. I told you before - they fixed themselves. Oh, yeah? Then where did this come from, eh? Out of your nostril? Eh? Nostrils, eh? Central Services. They don't take kindly to sabotage. Sabotage, huh? Jesus, this place is in a terrible state. Just a minute! You're not gonna leave it like this, are you? Why not? All you gotta do is blow your nose and it's fixed, innit?