The era of making homes perfect not homely

When, exactly, did we decide our worlds had to be perfectly designed?

Why this craving for brushed steel double-doored refrigerators with matching stove and dishwasher? Why granite kitchen countertops? Why ensuite bathrooms, one for each bedroom? Why greatrooms (the "great" being an upper-middle-class pretension meaning, simply, "big")? Why statement living rooms no one lives in?

Why hardwood floors and entertainment centres and cunningly inoffensive artwork and crown mouldings and indirect lighting and uncomfortable Jetson-like furniture unsuited to the human body?

Why bedrooms that appear to belong in a hotel, rather than a home? Why an overarching arid tastefulness, rather than the accreted untidy knick-knacks of life and family?

Why this tyranny of design?

Thirty or 40 years ago, it wasn't so. Look at the faded photos of your parents' home way back when.

If you were middle-class, or even upper-middle-class, odds are they show homes that weren't "decorated," in any sense of the word.

But they were homes, as opposed to expressions of, or pretensions to, style. Probably there were too many framed family photographs on the living room walls and fireplace mantel.

The layout included your Dad's hopelessly outré but oh-so-comfortable La-Z-Boy recliner.

The kitchen contained an avocado-coloured refrigerator and white stove, the makes of which didn't match, either.

The shelves were laden down with your mom's collection of china, the treasures her children made for her in school and those ubiquitous Tetley tea figurines she collected.

Probably there was only one bathroom -- or, at most, two -- and the total square footage would now be considered criminally small, though at the time it seemed perfectly adequate for a family of four or five to grow up in.

That family grew up and became Us. Us became a demographic with a dynamic for consumption that was uniquely its own.

The world had never seen anything like it.

Us had more money (or, at least, more credit) than it knew what to do with, and an appetite for what it believed to be the best of everything. The appetite believed itself sophisticated but was exactly the opposite: It was safe and pedestrian and conformist.

To feed this appetite for the best of everything, along came an entire class of builders, designers, decorators, glossy magazines (the countless middle-class offspring of Architectural Digest), fat newspaper sections, legions of realtors, gleaming bath and appliance showrooms and a rash of television shows that target flippers, second-home buyers, handymen, mistreated homeowners with cracked foundations, historical-home restorers, compulsive neat freaks, rabid organizers, space-starved apartment dwellers and wannabe downtown gentrifiers who, at show's end, are always agog at the transformation their home has undergone at the hands, typically, of a pair of gay interior decorators.

The result is always tasteful and, oddly, wearily uniform.

Is all this merely an expression of money, of income improving the housing stock?

To some extent, yes. People feel they can afford the better things in life and see no reason why they shouldn't have them. (It may also explain why our debt loads are so much greater than our parents'.) They accustom themselves to the idea of interior decoration.

In my own neighbourhood, I know three interior decorators within the space of six blocks.

But it's also a matter of obsessive control, of trying to bring order to the chaos of life. Clearing your kitchen counter of clutter becomes the design equivalent of purging yourself of sin. Say three Hail Marys and, darling, lose the tacky cookie jar.

The question is, what else do you lose with it?

There may be no better expression of this than what is now becoming known as "staging" -- that is, the staging of one's home. An interior decorator will come in and replace your furniture and artwork to a degree he or she deems tasteful. Or the decorator will suggest what to remove or include to make your home more salable.

In effect, the decorator visually edits your home.

Usually, you stage a home when you're trying to sell it. I talked to one realtor who swears by staging: She had staged every home she sold in the last year and a half, she said, and the staging propelled sales.

Her stager -- called a "fluffer" in the business -- would come in and prepare the house before it went on the market. Prospective buyers could better visualize living in a home, she said, if it was staged.

But staging has gone even beyond that. The realtor said she had begun to stage brand new homes, which she would once have sold empty. Buyers were coming to expect to see tasteful decorating even in spotless, unblemished homes.

Staging has now even percolated down to homeowners who don't want to sell. They want someone to come in and edit their homes, which isn't the same as giving an interior decorator free rein for a complete redesign. It's the difference between radical liposuction and going to the gym.

But what does it say about us when we stage our homes, rather than live in them?

I know what it says about me, because I'm as susceptible to the tyranny of design and accepted taste as any of Us. My children call me Pete McMartha, as in Martha Stewart, because I know how to set a formal dinner table and look longingly at Restoration Hardware catalogues.

Meanwhile, my wife clutters up the place with too many damn pots and quilts on the couches and pictures on the refrigerator and vases full of garden flowers that drop petals all over the floor.

I dream of building a perfect house.

She works at building an imperfect home.

(prepared by Peter McMartin/Vancouver Sun)