28 December

Every ’stunning’ home on this show looks pretty much like every other stunning home on the show. And like most homes on most shows on TV, about houses. Polished concrete, big windows, open plan living, stone and wood and copper etc. When we find something beautiful, so often what makes us think that is entirely social. We love it because other people love it. That then starts a status bidding game, towards luxury, the continuous escalation of a status war around the same basic housing elements. Beauty is not in the object, it’s in the competitive imitative rivalry between people. For example, I will bet that the next shift in housing design will be back to the colour and play of the 1960s and 1970s, at which point all these ‘stunning’ homes will look brutalist and dated. Those 60s and 70s homes look dated to the current modernist/brutalist/minimalist fans. But they will suddenly find them stunning, just watch.