Much Ado About Nothing

Is a cold, sanitised, minimalist aesthetic really aspirational? When it comes to our homes, a 'more is more' attitude might reflect a healthier outlook.

- Lauren Gallow

WE ALL KNOW the saying ‘less is more’. Over the past century, the aphorism has become a battle cry for architects and designers, defining a modernist aesthetic that champions the minimal and the refined over the busy and the ornamental as a path toward better living. But has our understanding of minimalism itself become a little too reductive? And does it even fit with our collective ethos here in 2024?

While the pithy phrase was popularised by the 20th century German American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, it doesn’t apply to the way many of his clients actually lived in his buildings. Photographs of Farnsworth House, his modernist glass-box icon, show a space arranged as Mies had envisaged it, with his streamlined furnishings and pared-back interiors. In fact, the home was inhabited quite differently by the physician and poet who commissioned it and for whom it is named. Dr Edith Farnsworth—a lover of music and travel— enlivened her weekend house with eclectic furnishings and mementos that, in sum, were anything but minimal.

What this example illustrates is that maximalism has always existed alongside minimalism. While history loves a linear progression from one clear idea to another, the reality is that culture is far more complex and multifaceted. The past century has been defined in many circles as an era of minimalism, peaking in recent years with the rise of declutter advocates such as Marie Kondo and Fumio Sasaki, but ‘more is more’ has always been bubbling beneath the surface. Today, it just might be boiling over.