The Dating Game

When gut renovations beget more gut renovations.

The look and feel of a home used to be the most personal of decisions; walking into someone’s house for the first time was to understand them on a deeper level. But today those choices — the flooring, the fixtures, the cabinetry and everything else — are strategic. Gut renovations tend to reflect the broader trends in society, and you can feel the invisible hand of the market even in our most intimate spaces.

For kitchens — which is what we’re really talking about, when we talk about renovation — the pendulum has swung away from clean, white, modern and minimal to natural wood cabinetry and cladding with brass or black finishes. There is a tendency to go further (all wood everything is a big thing at the moment), but you know how this works. The more on the nose you are now, the more out of it you’ll be later. You do not want to end up as the home renovation equivalent of a fashion victim. On that front, we fear the worst for Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis.

For a case in point, Curbed brings us a cautionary tale about Truffles Tribeca, a hilariously named, incredibly costly, embarrassingly trendy development in Manhattan. The building is constructed almost entirely out of late-2000’s clichès, from the intentionally exposed ductwork to the opium den decor. Barely a decade later, it’s being stripped to the studs, to remove every trace of the allegedly-cool-then, repulsively-dated-now decor. Don’t be Truffles Tribeca.

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