I like artwork from the Dutch Golden Age in part for the same reason I like Mid Century Modern architecture and furnishings:
My sister was born in Germany and lived the first few years of her life there. I was born in Georgia and lived most of my first two decades of life there. My sister's home tends to look much more European than mine in its decor.
Some of the families I knew growing up had German furnishings in their homes, like German shranks in the living room and a wardrobe in the bedroom. German shranks are huge wall units that hold everything and have myriad kinds of storage, from shelves to drawers to cabinets.
We didn't have German furniture of that sort in my childhood home. It was one of many details that made me feel cut off from my German heritage.
Instead, my parents hired a furniture maker to build a custom unit to fit the space available and serve specific needs. It was maybe five feet wide, with bookshelves up top and cabinets below, as if it were a bastard child born of the mating of a German shrank and American bookshelves.
My mother also bought me a set of three American wall units for my bedroom. I think they were each 2.5 feet wide and could be clamped together on top so they formed a solid piece almost like a German shrank.
Two had cabinets below, one had a built-in desk and one was all shelving. This variety of storage was very similar to how German living room shranks work.
I didn't understand these choices dictated largely by my mother until I was an American military wife living in Germany in my twenties. We went downtown to look at German furniture and German living room shranks simply didn't work for us at all, even before considering they were out of our budget.
My husband and I had thousands of books and did not drink, so we had no need for a built-in bar or some such in highly decorated furnishings. We ended up going on base and buying cheap bookshelves because that was what we really needed: Storage for our endless books.
My best friend in Germany was an American military wife who was somewhat older than me and had one child instead of two, so she had more money than I had. Like a lot of Americans, she was quite enamored of German furniture and she bought two German shranks while living there. When she returned to the US, she had a custom home built in order to be able to fit her German shranks.
One day, she showed up on site and they had framed out a staircase wrong, making it long and straight instead of having a turn. She made them re-do it because the error was destroying the long expanse of uninterrupted wall she needed to be able to fit her German furniture, which was the entire point of going to the trouble to have a custom home built to begin with.
Unlike American homes, most German homes are not single family detached homes. Whether they rent or buy, they are likely to be part of a multi-story building with thicker walls than is the norm in the US, an entrance half a flight of steps below the main floor to keep the cold air out of the home, few or no closets and fewer windows than American homes tend to have.
When I was living in Germany, my German landlord told me they tend to not have closets because you get taxed per room and when you put a door on it, the closet gets taxed as an additional room. She explained this while gesturing to a curtained alcove in her kitchen, her means to have a closet without paying the extra taxes.
So Germans have shranks to store all their stuff in place of closets and even modest apartments routinely have long expanses of uninterrupted wall space where a shrank readily fits. They tend to have shranks designed for the living room and different ones designed for the bedroom.
American homes are generally quite different from German homes. The addition of closets and extra windows typical of US homes means it's unusual to have an uninterrupted expanse of wall of ten-plus feet, even in quite large homes.
At some point I went househunting with my older and more monied sister in Augusta, Georgia, another city like the one I grew up in with a nearby military base. One of the houses we looked at had a weird long hallway that led to a single room the owners had added onto the house to hold their German shrank. They were selling the shrank with the home so they wouldn't have to hassle with it again.
I also at some point got some hand-me-down furniture from my sister. It was American furniture very much in the style of a German bedroom shrank where you needed a bedroom with an uninterrupted wall of twelve or fourteen feet to fit it.
For a few years, I had both this bedroom set and the three wall units my mother had bought me that could be clamped together if you had a wall that fit them or split up if you didn't. In one house, I had one of those three units by the front door and the other two elsewhere.
For some years, I also owned a black shelving unit that had metal framing and floating shelves that could be adjust as you saw fit. It was like four "ladder"-style metal supports with cross supports for the back and you could move the shelves anywhere as you saw fit to accommodate taller or shorter items.
The whole thing could be completely broken down to individual shelves and individual frame parts and easily moved up or down stairs or through narrow halls or doorways. I loved this black shelving unit and I bought a small, cheap black TV stand that fit between the metal frames so I could use it as an entertainment center, not just shelves, sort of like a German shrank only vastly more flexible and lightweight.
Between the black shelving unit and the three wall units my mother had bought me, I got to see firsthand that you can have an entire wall of storage without having the headaches involved with German shranks. You don't have to pick one or the other.
So I finally got my head wrapped around my mother's aversion to bringing German furniture to an American home. German furniture is built the way it is built due to German weather and German laws and regulations making such furniture make sense.
German homes have fewer windows due in part to the cold climate. German shranks are not only storage, they help insulate the home from the cold outside by covering most of one wall that is likely to be an outside wall.
Furniture style is not just about aesthetics. In order to work well, style needs to consider contextual details such as the weather and laws of the country in question and how that shapes residential design and architecture.
This crucial detail seems to get glossed over in most shelter magazines that ooh and aah over what things look like and abstract concepts like the taste of the designer and very frequently say little or nothing about zoning laws, why vernacular architecture evolved in a particular direction -- something always strongly influenced by local climate -- and so forth.
More recently, I have spent the past nearly five years living in three different rental units across two different buildings in a walkable historic downtown area in a small American town. Both of the buildings I've lived in are around a hundred years old.
I have come to appreciate many of the details of these older buildings -- passive solar design means it rarely matters that I have no AC -- while being made aware of the friction between modern life and these old buildings and what they lack because it hadn't yet been invented.
My neighbors seem much more bothered by the lack of AC than me and my sons. My sons and I have more spartan lives than the residents of the units around us, having given up North American Affluenza permanently for health reasons.
In the previous building, other residents routinely opened windows and doors, desperately trying to create a cross breeze while sweating and cranky. Our room was usually fine.
While I was getting divorced, my sons and I moved in with relatives for nearly a year and the three of us shared a single bedroom. There happened to be a thermometer in the window and we soon learned that removing all the cardboard boxes from cases of soda and other food stuffs consistently dropped the temperature in the room by five degrees Fahrenheit, which dramatically improved our comfort level and also reduced the number of roaches we saw as roaches favor hot and humid climates.
It soon became policy to take everything out of the cardboard boxes when we got groceries home so the room stayed a bearable temperature and the humidity stayed down for purposes of being able to sleep. It is a habit we have continued ever since in part because I likely have a paper allergy.
Cardboard boxes give off heat and humidity, much like rotting compost heaps give off heat and humidity. So does carpeting, upholestered furniture, stacks of clothing and similar.
I don't own upholstered furniture and don't have a lot of clothes and so forth. I have minimal possessions and they skew towards things like shelves, tables and chairs made from metal and hard plastic.
The scale of a lot of modern furniture, like standard couches, is also flat out too large for these old buildings. Such furnishings not only don't fit well in the small rental spaces, they can be challenging to get up or down the stairs and through the hallways.
If Americans are going to resume building SROs and Missing Middle Housing to create walkable, mixed use neighborhoods, we will need to give up our addiction to North American Affluenza -- starting with downsizing our tastes in furnishings and learning to live by the motto "When in doubt, throw it out" rather than skewing towards hoarding behaviors.
Mid Century Modern furnishings are generally more appropriately scaled than a lot of contemporary furnishings, though I am also on the look out for other style options that would work. I have recently taken an interest in the 1920s as a potential additional resource for ideas and inspiration.
They both seem to capture a time when people had a high quality of life because there was enough to go around and this was new enough that it hadn't yet morphed into North American Affluenza...My late father was an American soldier. My mother is a German immigrant.
My sister was born in Germany and lived the first few years of her life there. I was born in Georgia and lived most of my first two decades of life there. My sister's home tends to look much more European than mine in its decor.
Some of the families I knew growing up had German furnishings in their homes, like German shranks in the living room and a wardrobe in the bedroom. German shranks are huge wall units that hold everything and have myriad kinds of storage, from shelves to drawers to cabinets.
We didn't have German furniture of that sort in my childhood home. It was one of many details that made me feel cut off from my German heritage.
Instead, my parents hired a furniture maker to build a custom unit to fit the space available and serve specific needs. It was maybe five feet wide, with bookshelves up top and cabinets below, as if it were a bastard child born of the mating of a German shrank and American bookshelves.
My mother also bought me a set of three American wall units for my bedroom. I think they were each 2.5 feet wide and could be clamped together on top so they formed a solid piece almost like a German shrank.
Two had cabinets below, one had a built-in desk and one was all shelving. This variety of storage was very similar to how German living room shranks work.
I didn't understand these choices dictated largely by my mother until I was an American military wife living in Germany in my twenties. We went downtown to look at German furniture and German living room shranks simply didn't work for us at all, even before considering they were out of our budget.
My husband and I had thousands of books and did not drink, so we had no need for a built-in bar or some such in highly decorated furnishings. We ended up going on base and buying cheap bookshelves because that was what we really needed: Storage for our endless books.
My best friend in Germany was an American military wife who was somewhat older than me and had one child instead of two, so she had more money than I had. Like a lot of Americans, she was quite enamored of German furniture and she bought two German shranks while living there. When she returned to the US, she had a custom home built in order to be able to fit her German shranks.
One day, she showed up on site and they had framed out a staircase wrong, making it long and straight instead of having a turn. She made them re-do it because the error was destroying the long expanse of uninterrupted wall she needed to be able to fit her German furniture, which was the entire point of going to the trouble to have a custom home built to begin with.
Unlike American homes, most German homes are not single family detached homes. Whether they rent or buy, they are likely to be part of a multi-story building with thicker walls than is the norm in the US, an entrance half a flight of steps below the main floor to keep the cold air out of the home, few or no closets and fewer windows than American homes tend to have.
When I was living in Germany, my German landlord told me they tend to not have closets because you get taxed per room and when you put a door on it, the closet gets taxed as an additional room. She explained this while gesturing to a curtained alcove in her kitchen, her means to have a closet without paying the extra taxes.
So Germans have shranks to store all their stuff in place of closets and even modest apartments routinely have long expanses of uninterrupted wall space where a shrank readily fits. They tend to have shranks designed for the living room and different ones designed for the bedroom.
American homes are generally quite different from German homes. The addition of closets and extra windows typical of US homes means it's unusual to have an uninterrupted expanse of wall of ten-plus feet, even in quite large homes.
At some point I went househunting with my older and more monied sister in Augusta, Georgia, another city like the one I grew up in with a nearby military base. One of the houses we looked at had a weird long hallway that led to a single room the owners had added onto the house to hold their German shrank. They were selling the shrank with the home so they wouldn't have to hassle with it again.
I also at some point got some hand-me-down furniture from my sister. It was American furniture very much in the style of a German bedroom shrank where you needed a bedroom with an uninterrupted wall of twelve or fourteen feet to fit it.
For a few years, I had both this bedroom set and the three wall units my mother had bought me that could be clamped together if you had a wall that fit them or split up if you didn't. In one house, I had one of those three units by the front door and the other two elsewhere.
For some years, I also owned a black shelving unit that had metal framing and floating shelves that could be adjust as you saw fit. It was like four "ladder"-style metal supports with cross supports for the back and you could move the shelves anywhere as you saw fit to accommodate taller or shorter items.
The whole thing could be completely broken down to individual shelves and individual frame parts and easily moved up or down stairs or through narrow halls or doorways. I loved this black shelving unit and I bought a small, cheap black TV stand that fit between the metal frames so I could use it as an entertainment center, not just shelves, sort of like a German shrank only vastly more flexible and lightweight.
Between the black shelving unit and the three wall units my mother had bought me, I got to see firsthand that you can have an entire wall of storage without having the headaches involved with German shranks. You don't have to pick one or the other.
So I finally got my head wrapped around my mother's aversion to bringing German furniture to an American home. German furniture is built the way it is built due to German weather and German laws and regulations making such furniture make sense.
German homes have fewer windows due in part to the cold climate. German shranks are not only storage, they help insulate the home from the cold outside by covering most of one wall that is likely to be an outside wall.
Furniture style is not just about aesthetics. In order to work well, style needs to consider contextual details such as the weather and laws of the country in question and how that shapes residential design and architecture.
This crucial detail seems to get glossed over in most shelter magazines that ooh and aah over what things look like and abstract concepts like the taste of the designer and very frequently say little or nothing about zoning laws, why vernacular architecture evolved in a particular direction -- something always strongly influenced by local climate -- and so forth.
More recently, I have spent the past nearly five years living in three different rental units across two different buildings in a walkable historic downtown area in a small American town. Both of the buildings I've lived in are around a hundred years old.
I have come to appreciate many of the details of these older buildings -- passive solar design means it rarely matters that I have no AC -- while being made aware of the friction between modern life and these old buildings and what they lack because it hadn't yet been invented.
My neighbors seem much more bothered by the lack of AC than me and my sons. My sons and I have more spartan lives than the residents of the units around us, having given up North American Affluenza permanently for health reasons.
In the previous building, other residents routinely opened windows and doors, desperately trying to create a cross breeze while sweating and cranky. Our room was usually fine.
While I was getting divorced, my sons and I moved in with relatives for nearly a year and the three of us shared a single bedroom. There happened to be a thermometer in the window and we soon learned that removing all the cardboard boxes from cases of soda and other food stuffs consistently dropped the temperature in the room by five degrees Fahrenheit, which dramatically improved our comfort level and also reduced the number of roaches we saw as roaches favor hot and humid climates.
It soon became policy to take everything out of the cardboard boxes when we got groceries home so the room stayed a bearable temperature and the humidity stayed down for purposes of being able to sleep. It is a habit we have continued ever since in part because I likely have a paper allergy.
Cardboard boxes give off heat and humidity, much like rotting compost heaps give off heat and humidity. So does carpeting, upholestered furniture, stacks of clothing and similar.
I don't own upholstered furniture and don't have a lot of clothes and so forth. I have minimal possessions and they skew towards things like shelves, tables and chairs made from metal and hard plastic.
The scale of a lot of modern furniture, like standard couches, is also flat out too large for these old buildings. Such furnishings not only don't fit well in the small rental spaces, they can be challenging to get up or down the stairs and through the hallways.
If Americans are going to resume building SROs and Missing Middle Housing to create walkable, mixed use neighborhoods, we will need to give up our addiction to North American Affluenza -- starting with downsizing our tastes in furnishings and learning to live by the motto "When in doubt, throw it out" rather than skewing towards hoarding behaviors.
Mid Century Modern furnishings are generally more appropriately scaled than a lot of contemporary furnishings, though I am also on the look out for other style options that would work. I have recently taken an interest in the 1920s as a potential additional resource for ideas and inspiration.