Where the heck am I?

There’s an article in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal about the renovation of the Little Nell Hotel in Colorado. They’re spending a butt load of money to move away from the old regional style of decorating (antlers, raw timber) to the modern look. Setting aside that “modern” bores the pants off me (by all means, if you can’t come up with anything creative, any idiot can do boilerplate modern), what really ticks me about this is that I’m getting really tired of going to a city and not being able to tell where the hell you are because every design scheme you see is dripping in “taste” – yawn, yawn, yawn.

Okay, some of this is a Texas thing. We like slapping Texas stars and tooled leather on things. But, I want to see hippie chic in Seattle. I want to see southern charm in Savannah. I want to see pastels and deco in Miami. I want a splash of Federal in DC. But everybody’s so damned afraid of being tacky, they retreat back to neutral palates and bland design. Sure modern works in a lot of big urban centers. But I expect modern in NYC to be different from modern in Chicago, and both to be different from modern in LA.

And humans bring it on themselves. On the one hand, we criticize people who are outside the norm that we expect. And on the other, we breed fear of being criticized for being different. So no one one want to offend. No one wants to be offended. So we all end up wandering in a tiny little box that gets tinier by the minute. A tiny modern box, with no rough edges, no color and no FLAIR.

So I say bring back the wagon wheel chandeliers. Bring back the Amish hex signs. Bring back the coffee cups with blue crabs and the saguaro cactus salt and pepper shakers. Be proud of your town. Let the décor say “Welcome to ____” rather than “If it’s Thursday this must be ____”. What’s the point of getting up and going somewhere, if it just ends up looking exactly like the place you just left?