Where are the cords? Interior Design vs. IRL Living

Plus oven mitts vs. oven gloves

On Saturday, New York was hit with a wintry mix that involved hail, windy, and alternating snow, sleet, and rain. It would have been the perfect day to hunker down with a good book, but I had other plans. I picked up Julia and we headed to Remix Market in Long Island City, a secondhand shop full of furniture and other stuff for the home. Julia, a noted maximalist, called the place her heaven and said we were definitely in our late 20s as we took multiple laps around the store, eager to not miss an item. We weren’t always like this—we were roommates for 3 years and spent approximately zero hours designing our shared (and beloved) home, but now I find myself browsing furniture sites, Instagram accounts, and facebook marketplace looking for pieces. Is this growing up?

Part of this change is the pandemic, which has led to spending so much more time at home and part of it is moving into an apartment I hope to stay in for a while (thank goodness it’s rent stabilized). I’m very much a design newbie and I find a lot of the content out there very unrelatable and staged. Sometimes I wonder if these people have a room of clutter that’s not photographed or if they shove everything in a closet for the day. Flip through an issue of Architectural Digest and you’ll see tiny nightstands with nary a drawer for a mouthguard case, pristine bathroom counters with no toothpaste tubes to be found, no cords in sight but many electronics (they often photoshop cords outs, according to Jenna Lyons, who asked that they leave a cord in this feature). Here’s what Lyons said about the cord, pictured below

“This lamp, by Italian lighting manufacturer GUZZINI, is the source of endless conversation — about its unusual color, its shape, the way that you can tilt the top to direct the light and that it can sit on a surface or hang on a wall. But mostly, talk revolves around the cord. For photographs, the impulse is always to photoshop it out, but I love it. It’s as essential to the look of the lamp as the rest of it. I have a pair of white ones at the beach.” 

Photo by COLLIN HUGHES for 1stDibs