It’s HGTV’s Fault I Hate My Home, or Something

Washington Post’s “The Home You Own” reporter Rachel Kurzius:

If you’ve ever watched a home makeover show on HGTV, you know the key “before” sequence. It’s when the camera critically pans over the house and the host points out everything that needs to be fixed. The decor? Cluttered. The paint? Cringe. The overall takeaway is that the home is an utter embarrassment and needs a total overhaul before anyone of taste would consider putting a doormat out front.

But what happens when people consider how their own homes might fare under this kind of scrutiny? It can lead to an overwhelming sameness in aesthetics, according to Annetta Grant, an assistant professor of markets, innovation and design at Bucknell University, who researched how home renovation media such as HGTV and magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens influenced homeowners.

Grant calls the idea that anyone could be scrutinizing or judging your decorating choices the “market-reflected gaze” in a research paper with Jay M. Handelman, an associate professor of marketing at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Their findings came in large part from interviews with 17 homeowners doing renovations.

“They’re seeing everything that’s wrong with their home and imagining when people come into their home [that] they’re also criticizing and scrutinizing and judging their home,” says Grant. “It really makes people feel quite uneasy about the decisions that they make in their home, and so they’re always kind of fearful about getting it wrong.” (HGTV did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Washington Post.)

Wrong, in this case, has become defined as a decision that will make your home less appealing to buyers, even if you have no plans to put it on the market.

Homeowners are “torn between two ideas of what the home should be,” says Grant. The common wisdom is that buying a home ideally has two main benefits: You can build wealth and modify your space to your unique tastes. Grant’s framework shows these two benefits in conflict with one another.

The gaze is creating a “shift towards standardization,” she says. And it’s not just happening in rooms of the house where people expect guests to come, she found. That gaze extends to bedrooms and primary bathrooms, too.

Among the 17 people who participated in the research, most expressed the desire to be “that smart homeowner who has invested in my home and now, on paper, my home is worth so much more,” Grant says. So in order to be savvy, they might skip out on bolder choices in renovation and decor.

Instead, neutrals reign supreme, and the goal is to create a place that is inoffensive and could appeal to many. One interviewee for the study, Gabrielle, told the researchers about feedback she received on her renovated bathroom: “I think people really are complimentary on the bathroom because it’s a bit more like a hotel room kind of cleanliness, looking very streamlined, and everything coordinates.”

We must pause here for a moment and highlight this particular section that checks far too many boxes to have gotten in there by accident, and presented without further comment:

Ruth DeSantis, a climate scientist in Calgary, Alberta, found Grant’s research on Facebook and says it immediately resonated. She describes the HGTV aesthetic as “trying to get to this perfection, even though that’s totally impossible and unrealistic and I don’t like it anyway.”

The research struck a chord with her because “I have friends who will come to my house and say they like my kitchen except the white appliances,” she says. But the research inspired her to keep her white ones “because I like them,” rather than switch to a stainless-steel version she finds less appealing and more difficult to clean. “People are ripping out perfectly good kitchens and replacing them because they have the wrong color for the season,” says DeSantis. “I think that message needs to change because the environmental impact is so huge.”

Found it on Facebook, to comment to WaPo, who just happened to be…

Anywho, now that we got that settled…

I am someone who watches plenty of HGTV and also owns a home that was a studs-and-subfloor-up renovation when I agreed to purchase it. HGTV is not the problem here. Watching HGTV doesn’t make you insecure about your home any more than watching SVU makes you worry about getting arrested, unless you are projecting. If you read the quotes in the piece, it is clear that — like a lot of things — the insecurities and worries of the folks involved are manifested through their home and they are using their entertainment viewing options to reinforce and feed those issues. The piece rightly points out that since owning a home is often the largest financial investment most folks make, healthy levels of concern, planning, and seeking ideas is healthy. As in all things, moderation is the key.

Being honest about your home requires a bit of self-awareness and honest perspective. Is this really a “forever home” as the current buzzword go? My parents house, which was my grandmother’s house, which sits on the mountain my family and ancestors have been on for over 200 years now — yeah, that one is staying in the family. My renovated house bought as the always celebrated “flip and improve” the proverbial “worst house in a nice neighborhood that just needs bettering” that is the bread and butter of HGTV and designed to be for the kids until they go off on their own after school — it is going to get sold. Especially with the sharp rise in appraisal value the last few years which will make for a good return investment when the time comes. So, while I don’t worry about the resale of my folks’ house, I can tell you pretty close to what the current house is going to go for at any given time.

Yes, that affects my decisions, especially when doing improvement and upkeep. But that is healthy, I want a good price when it is time to move on. Until then, though, this ain’t a museum or staged-for-showing production. There are too many kids, too many animals, and too much going on. There is clutter, there is constant cleaning and pickup up to do, there are messes, there is noise, there is not matching decor. Because it is a lived-in home; not just a house, not just a property, not just an investment. You can do both, but if the latter overtakes the former, you’ve done missed the whole point anyway.

A chair is just a chair, and so forth as Luther croons, but a chair is not a house and a house is not a home if all you are doing is worrying about the color palette for resale. That is the path to destruction, and becoming one of those stark raving heathens who paints your house black. That works for the Rolling Stones, not your fixer-upper. Stop it. Do better. Turn towards the light. Live, laugh, love. Or, something.