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The minimalist is fussy about their domestic space. It has to be clutter-free, of course, but sometimes if the lack of contents is too extreme, that is a problem too.

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I lived for five years in a second-floor apartment in Somerville, Massachu-setts, two cities north of Boston. Between Boston and Somerville is liberal, middle class, wealthy, expensive Cambridge, the city with two of the best-known  and  well-respected universities in the world, Harvard and MIT. Even the residents of Cambridge realize that the city and its residents take themselves a little too seriously. Somerville is very much a working-class city, or at least it was when I lived there in the late 1990s. Parts of it were like a grimy suburb, parts of it seemed like a dangerous place to be at night, parts of it were beautiful and green and unpretentious, but most of it seemed like a practical little town. I liked it and felt very comfortable there. 

I moved into my apartment before all my furniture was delivered and before I even had a bed to sleep on. I bought a sleeping bag and slept on the unsullied hardwood floor of the bedroom for several weeks. The floor was hard but clean and simple, every night I positioned the zipper on the sleeping bag so that it didn’t rub against the hardwood and scratch it. 

I never loved that apartment more than those weeks when there was very little in it except me, my sleeping bag, some clothes, and a few other necessities. I swept the floor in the living room (also hardwood) one day and then, when the light caught it at a certain angle, I noticed that the bristles from the broom had made the slightest scratches on the newly refinished floors, and it really saddened me, that loss of perfection, that inexorable slide of something beautiful into the slough of reality. 

The place was impractical, with nothing even to sit on, no television to watch, and no internet connection to divert me, and my memory is vague now on how exactly I spent my free time after work and on the weekends. I must have been busy, but doing what, I’m not quite sure. This wasn’t a period in my life when I was really reading books, and I had little or no social life. The apartment was a “less is more” microcosm of how I felt about my life, though: it had nothing in it to bump into or cause pain, and the possibilities for filling it up were numerous.

David E. Shi, author of The Simple Life, cites Edward Bok, former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, on the many downsides of a cluttered home:

While promoting a plain, functional, affordable architectural style, Bok also led a campaign for simplified home interiors. “The curse of the American home to-day,” he wrote in 1900, “is useless bric-a-brac.” The tasteless overfurnishing in the Queen Anne style then so popular among the urban middle class, he had decided, was contributing directly to the rising nervousness of American women, for they were becoming harried slaves to the “useless rubbish” filling their parlors. Moreover, such homes were not conducive to the development of good moral character in the young. “No child,” he said, “can develop a true simplicity of nature when the home of his parents was stifled by shams.” Useless gimcracks, he insisted with Thoreau-like reasoning, only gather dust and offend the eye. “Simplicity is the only thing that ornaments.” In fact it does more than that, he continued, “it dignifies.” The most aesthetically pleasing rooms were determined not by what they contained but by what they disdained. Nothing should be bought for a home that did not perform a useful or aesthetic function. (187)

The minimalist is of course very fussy about his domestic interior, and the obvious is true: he will want as little in it as possible while generally still having it function as a practical space. There are extremes, for example, some minimalists who forego furniture, preferring the spare look to the practicality of having chairs to sit on in the living room or a table in the dining room.

As a less-extreme minimalist, I am in fact very dubious about those too-perfect houses, those ones that look like they are empty shells waiting to be filled in with something, like showrooms. Part of me feels a thrill at the extremeness of it, like a man with a sensible sedan might marvel at a Porsche. I kind of wish that I were that far along in my minimalism, where in a way I would be brave enough to be so object-free. But another part of me worries that such near-perfection is not really sustainable. 

There are pictures on the website Minimalissimo of a minimalist architect’s  house.  It  is  not  only extraordinarily minimalist, spare, stark, but is also very white. This appeals to me and many other minimalists at a very primal level, but those of us with any tincture of practicality (and sometimes, but only sometimes, I am one of those) also shiver at how difficult it would be to maintain such beauty and perfection. I keep thinking of the facial hairs that would sully a formerly pristine sink after a single shave. 

And that’s what it’s like: it always seems like the world is out to destroy what I as a minimalist am seeking to create and maintain. Sometimes I try to obviate what the world is apparently trying to do by removing myself (staying put in whatever situation I am in, on the premise that the imperfections I am used to are at least more familiar than the ones that I know nothing about). I would be nervous about living in one of those spare, hyper-perfect houses. I would expend a lot of energy trying to keep the place in the exact same shape it was in when I moved in, and to that extent I would also not really be taking advantage of the place, would not loll about in its comfort. This is the same attitude that I have in any house, but a hyper-perfect house would exaggerate my propensities even more. It would either be a hopeless dream, a house that of course could not be maintained to the level of minimalist perfection that I would want it to be in, or a kind of domestic nightmare in which I would live a life of constraint, sort of, kind of satisfied with what I could glean from it, sometimes lying to myself that the place looks as good as I want it to be, but feeling tense all the time (and often not knowing the reason for this tension) about the impossible task. 

The fact is that the only time that extreme spareness in a domestic space looks beautiful is when that space is hyper-clean and expensive. If it’s not, then the result just looks like an average, or grimy, space with not a lot of things in it. One extreme is that super-rich house with hardly anything in it. It looks beautiful because the high quality of the empty space itself fills in the beauty that is not being supplied by objects. The other extreme is the dirty cabin with hardly any furniture or any other comfort of life in it: it just looks shabby. There is no beauty there. You are left with the impression of privation, of something missing. In those spaces where there are no things, there is no ambient beauty to fill them all up. Interviewee Carl from Brampton, Ontario, makes the connection in his own life between minimalism and quality:

We are living in a society right now where possessions are literally frivolous, and therefore this actually motivates in keeping possessions to a minimum. Being aware of what energy/money is being spent on puts everything in perspective. I notice that acquiring things today is equivalent to “a dog chasing its tail.” This society has people in a continuously baby-spoon-fed-upgrading quandary. I actually have always been a weeding out type, so even now with minimalism, I still weed out while trying to maintain top quality over quantity.

Domestic simplicity often needs high quality in order to be or appear clean. The problem is that those exquisite minimalist interiors usually entail the most beautiful and expensive building materials, and the same for the furniture. When the practical minimalist with the average salary tries to replicate the effect in his own modest apartment, the end result is often not so much beautifully minimalist, as unfurnished or dumpily furnished. Someone walking into the apartment won’t marvel at the spare beauty, but will wonder where all the furniture is – and might conclude from what furniture there is that the poor minimalist just can’t afford it. Interviewee Kareen from Ottawa says that this is one of the disadvantages of practical domestic minimalism: “When it comes to the gatherings of family or friends, your place is not always the best choice. You end up looking not as welcoming as you would like to be.”