With hidden doors, clean lines, sharp edges and ample living areas, interior designer Eric Kant has created a home that is not only sleek and stylish, but comfortable, spacious and luxurious.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of aesthetic beauty in these pictures, but goddamn, am I tired of “modern design” being a practical shorthand for “houses made for short, thin young people with freakishly long arms who don’t own any books and have no children”.
I mean, look at the way these doors are positioned:
From the way the wooden door sits in the frame, it’s clearly designed to open outwards - but if, as pictured here, the glass door is open at the same time, then you won’t be able to open the wooden door to its full extent; you’d constantly be forced to try and squeak through a narrow gap. Both doors also look big and heavy - the glass one in particular seems like something you’d have to keep open and fixed via a floor-catch 99% of the time, on account of the fact that a) it can’t rest against the wall and, b) has no handles - so this is an inconvenience you’d be living with pretty much constantly.
Then there’s this couch:
Look how low-slung this thing is. That wouldn’t be so bad if it actually had armrests along its length, but it doesn’t - so if you want to get up or down, you’re going to have to brace your entire weight on the soft cushions and lurch to your feet like a reanimated mummy. This might be practical if, as stated, you’re a short, thin young person with freakishly long arms, but the rest of us would have permanent knee damage after the first week.
Note also, please, these ridiculous suspended lights, which are everywhere:
Sure, they’re beautiful, but speaking from the experience of having grown up in a house with at least one ridiculously high, architecturally pretty ceiling, this is all going to be dusty and cobwebbed as fuck inside of a month, and unless you have the time, money and/or inclination to routinely have an enormous ladder hauled indoors to clean those things, then I guarantee that the first blown bulb is going to mark their transition from “pretty glowy things” to “dim stalactites” to, eventually, “freestanding cubes of darkness”.
Plus and also, having all this glass everywhere, in the form of doors and balconies? Yeah, that would be part of the “no children” requirement: otherwise, you’re going to spend 25 hours a day Windexing slobber and handprints off of everything.
Which brings me to the delicate matter of this table:
Seriously: take a moment to contemplate this thing. Yes, it’s big and gorgeous and that icebucket in the middle looks cool, but just imagine, for a moment, the logistics of actually trying to use it. Even if you’re sitting in a chair that can be pulled all the way up to the edge - which the blue one, at least, demonstrably can’t be - the table is so big that you’re still going to have to stand up and stretch out your freakishly long arms like a fucking ballet dancer to reach that champagne, and if the table actually has food on it, too, then good luck not knocking your platter of pheasant vol-au-vents into the caviar. And, once again, for the exact same reason, you have another frustratingly inaccessible light: one you can’t possibly dust or alter without putting your knees, feet and buttocks where the food should go.
My real complaint, though, is the simultaneous lack of inbuilt bookshelves, paired with a comparative dearth of useable wallspace against which to put some of your own:
I mean, look at this pitiful excuse for a shelf. That’s a big artbook lying there, the kind of coffee table hardback expressly designed to inhabit fancy places like this, but even it doesn’t fit into the space provided with any grace: it’s too tall to stand upright, and the space is too deep for it to lie flush with the backboard, spine out, and not look like it’s been swallowed, which is presumably why the photo instead shows it lying lengthwise. And if you had actual novels to house? Yes, you could stand them upright, but without a comforting end-bracket to cradle them, they’d just spill out onto the hardwood like sad, papery lemmings. So you’d have to stack them sideways, too, in meagre little piles two or three deep, which is always a storage method of last resort rather than one of preference, because, a) it means you can’t display your books, and b) they’re not readily accessible in the event that you want to get really wild, and read them.
In conclusion I have become a bitter old woman ranting at the peculiarities of a world I don’t understand while simultaneously weeping at the inadequate length of my tacky, proletarian armbones.