Down and Out in Denver

Greetings readers!  I’ve now returned to D-Town, but only for a day before both Alastair and I head out to the city by the Bay for some New Years celebrating!  But I’ve been lax about posting, so I give you this, my first installation on my obsession with HGTV.

HGTV, to which I was introduced only about a year ago, is the acronym for Home and Garden Television and features shows about … you guessed it, homes and gardens.  The shows can be divided into two genres: the Makeover shows and the Real Estate shows.  Occasionally, as in “Designed to Sell,” they overlap: make over house so that it can sell. But most stick to one format or another.  I far prefer the latter (many of which seem to be filmed in Denver and environs, including one with DaOiD’s own moniker — which we have finally managed to supplant in a Google search).  It’s like real estate pornography: so many homes, so little time!  And there is something completely voyeuristic about watching other people search for homes.  On the good ones, like “My First Place” or “Property Virgins,” you even get to hear the conversations about their budgets and mortgages and on all of them you get a sense of how these people (families, couples [gay and straight], single people, and occasionally friends) operate together.  The shows are on all the time and they’re completely addictive.  This post, in other words, cannot possibly do justice to all I have to say about HGTV.

So let me begin by discussing one of the things that, despite my love for them, bothers me about the people on the real estate shows.  Almost all of the house-hunters make a list of what they’re looking for and almost all of them – despite lots of variations in terms of size, house vs. apartment, city vs. country, number of bedrooms – demand five features.  And, you guessed it, dear readers, it’s those features with which I have a problem.  Before I tell you why, let’s review the wish list, shall we?

1. Open floor plan.  Especially for the kitchen in its relationship to the dining room and living room (or, absurdly, “great room”). No one wants walls these days, it would seem.  And many people say this is because they want to be able to converse with their guests when they entertain.  How often do these people entertain?

A particularly hideous granite-countertopped island in a kitchen that appears open to the rest of the house

2. Granite countertops in the kitchen.  I’m not a huge fan of granite myself, and while I do recognize that Formica is pretty ugly, let’s think outside the box just a little bit people.  What about limestone or tile or slate or stainless steel or poured concrete or butcher block?  There are ways to make one’s kitchen look new or updated or attractive without the shiny and sparkly veined granite.

3. Stainless steel appliances.  Nothing else will do.  Don’t even try to cross these people.

4. A master suite with ensuite bath.  Even in houses built before such things were customary, people demand that their master bedroom be enormous (the word “sanctuary” is thrown around far too frequently) and that it have a separate private bathroom.  Even when these people do not plan to live with anyone other than themselves; from whom do they seek privacy?

The Requisite Double Vanity

5. Double vanities/sinks in the ensuite bath.  So convinced seem these people that they will be fighting over sink time that I have actually seen a house rejected, despite having everything else on the list, because the bathroom only had – gasp – one sink.

So what’s my beef?  The first is that, with the possible exception of the stainless steel appliances, I think these things are silly.  They are status symbols foisted upon would-be home-buyers by the makeover shows on networks like HGTV, and in turn by their corporate sponsors who manufacture many of them.  I’m not fully persuaded that all of these people really want these things for any particular reason but they definitely know they are supposed to want them.  And request them they do.  It is how they plan to prove to their friends and family that they got a nice house.  This is conspicuous consumption, in other words.

The second is that I’m disturbed by the fact that everyone seems to want exactly the same house.  Whether this is also the influence of home and makeover shows or the overwhelming preference that many of these buyers seem to have for newly constructed houses, I dread the homogenization of the American home.  Although many of these people claim a desire to find a home that “expresses who we are as a couple/family,” what that means in practice is apparently that they are exactly the same as all other home-buying couples and families of the early twenty-first century (if HGTV can be taken to be at all representative).

And that’s just sad.  To get a real sense of the differences between the U.S. and home-buyers in other countries, check out “House Hunters International,” but that’s the subject of another post.