Heck Of A Guy

As I’ve grown older, if not wiser, I find myself spending less and less time ogling lurid photos of gorgeous homes in the slick paper department at Border’s.

Still, when the mood strikes, there are few ways for anyone with a dilettantish interest in home design to spend an afternoon hour than gazing at gazebos and pondering porticos.

The only home design magazine to which I currently subscribe is Dwell. I also obsessively purchase the annual Houses issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine.¹

I heartily recommend these,² especially Dwell, which makes a conscientious, albeit overly conspicuous and self-congratulatory, effort to address affordability and resource conservation without sacrificing style. Both magazines display intriguing houses of all sizes and costs, and the descriptions are surprisingly comprehensive and comprehendible.

Trends

In contrast, Trends3,

which caught my eye by accident only last week, appears, in many ways, to be a throwback to the genre popularized by Architectural Digest, featuring the equivalent of boudoir photos of unabashedly luxe homes inhabited by individuals whose primary housing concern is more likely to be finding the optimal space in which to display their avant garde art collection rather than making a mortgage payment.

The home pictured below is, to be fair, probably a standard deviation or two more expansive and commodious than the median home featured in Trends (it is also more expansive and commodious than my entire home town), but it was indeed the subject of an article in the magazine.

And, the prose tends toward the floridly pseudo-pedantic:

• The house itself is a sculptural composition of solid cubic masses, intersecting walls and floating roof planes that reinforce the direct, open nature of the floorplan.
• By having generous ceiling and space standards we have let the volumes speak for themselves.
• At first glance, the internal layout of the house appears rambling, almost organic. Yet, in reality it is composed along a series of independent axes.
  

On the other hand, I suspect few purchasers of this magazine would bother to offer the hackneyed rationalization that they buy it to read the articles.

This Is A Recommendation?

OK, it’s not my #1 Can’t Miss, Guaranteed Winner sort of recommendation. But, many of the houses are fetching as eye candy, and some are nothing less than striking. Further, there are desirable features that are potentially adaptable to less regal circumstances. Finally, this is the kind of publication that is invaluable as a resource for discovering furnishings, carpets, window treatments, lighting, etc. that one isn’t going to find at IKEA or Ethan Allen.⁴ Trends is, true to its name, trendy

If one is into this sort of thing - and I am - Trends may prove an enjoyable indulgence.

The nudge that pushed Trends over the cliff⁵ into the vale of recommendation, is the availability, at no charge, of massive amounts of content at the Trends web site,⁶ which also offers past issues of the magazine at a significant discount.

I suggest taking the web site for a test drive to check out the home I happened to see first. I’ve included a couple of photos to whet your appetite. The article and a dozen or so photos can be found at Trends House

Footnotes

1. The parallel between the Houses Issue of Fine Homebuilding and the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated is unmistakable↩
2. The links for these magazines go to the publishers’ sites; subscriptions may be less expensive from other sources↩
3. Should you ever be called upon to select a name for a magazine, I would advise you to avoid “Trends.” For the search terms “trends,” “magazine,” and “homes,” Google returns over 9,000,000 hits; trendsideas.com, the web site for the magazine, does not make an appearance in the first 300 entries↩
4. The original force behind the New Zealand corporate parent of Trends is the marketing of goods and services so it is hardly a surprise that the listings of appliances and such are extensive; it is also worth keeping in mind that marketing is precisely the point of such placements↩
5. By the way, it is a myth that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs; it is, however, true that ” During the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness, the film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior. ” See Snopes.com Urban Legend Pages. This clarification is presented as a Heck Of A Guy service at no extra charge.↩
6. The web site serves four major regions, United States & Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Asia. Changing the region of the web settings will often provide significant listings of goods which do not appear in other regions. While items listed in the Australia section, for example, may not be available in North America, they may still be inspiring and instructive↩

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