Monday 1 July 2013

House porn

I have always been slightly addicted to magazines. My whole family are. My habit was started as a small child when my sister and I had a subscription to Twinkle magazine. This later turned into Girl magazine, followed by Just Seventeen, Looks and finally Cosmopolitan - all paid for by good old Dad!


twinkle    girl teen magazine 1988 may 4    Just seventeen December 1988   looks magazine cover 1992 december



My dad himself has several magazine subscriptions on the go - Farmers Weekly, Tractor & Machinery and Autoexpress (can you tell he's a farmer??). 

My magazine habit continues to cost me a small fortune, the title and genre of magazine changing to reflect what is happening in my life. Once I met my future husband, all the Cosmos, Company's, Marie Claire's stopped (I no longer needed to read about how to find my perfect man!), to be replaced by wedding magazines! When we bought our first house, I discovered the world of home decor magazines, and when I got pregnant with our first child, our magazine rack became filled with the likes of Mother and Baby, Prima Baby and Junior magazine!

Since moving house, I have been well and truly sucked back into the world of house porn. Except this time, instead of Living Etc and House Beautiful, I have been seduced by the decidedly more glossy The English Home, Country Homes & Interiors and Period Homes. These magazines have some beautiful period properties featured, and over the last 18 months I have been sucking up all the beautiful pictures to try to get some inspiration for our home.

    The English Home - April 2011 (UK)   

Recently however, I have started to get more and more annoyed and disillusioned with these magazines. I have realised that the homes featured are all owned by people in the "business" ie interior designers, architects, property developers, antiques dealers, interiors shop owners etc, so not "normal" people who have done their house out nicely.

They all also seem to have had unlimited budgets, and vast arrays of antique family heirlooms in the shape of 12-seater dining tables and chairs, grandfather clocks, dressers, dressing tables etc. I queried it with my mum as to why we have no family antiques, and she said that Granny had chucked then all out in the 60s as they were "nasty, old dark wood" or "old-fashioned"! So gone are all the beautiful old oil lamps that Mum remembers from her childhood, the brass bed-steads, scrubbed pine tables, mahogany chests - basically everything that you see filling antiques emporiums these days, with a hefty price-tag attached. Whenever I look around an antique shop with my Mum, practically every item is something she remembers them having at home when she was growing up. All gone!

But apart from the lack of ordinary people in these features, the most annoying thing, and something that I have only just noticed, is the fact that these homes don't look lived in. They look too perfect. The biggest clue, is the fact that there are no televisions! I've been struggling with the layout in our drawing room, and had been looking to my magazines for help. All the rooms shown are perfectly laid out - and here's the important bit - around the fireplace which is the focal point of the room. The problem we have is that we have the focal point of the fireplace but also a bloody great flat screen TV parked in the corner. If I position the furniture neatly around the fireplace like in the magazines, it's impossible to watch telly comfortably. If I position the furniture so that all seating can watch telly, it just looks all wrong. 

Now, I don't believe that all these people featured in the magazines don't own TVs. I've realised that the photos are totally staged for the magazine. In our room we have extension leads trailing across the room, in order to plug in lamps where you actually need them. In the magazines, they have fabulous lamps on beautiful antique tables behind the sofas, but with no evidence of the power cables anywhere! I can only assume the lamps have been popped there for the photo.

I have probably been hugely naive in thinking that these were real people showing off their real homes. I did wonder why there was never any mention of the more practical stuff, like how they heat their 8 bedroom Georgian Manor house when it is -5 outside (we know how hard it is to heat an old house!), and the small fortune it took to re-wire the house. The realisation that the photos are staged for the magazine has really taken the shine off my enjoyment of these magazines, and leaves me sagging a little at the thought of never being able to make our house look as lovely as those.

So are these magazines to home-owners, what the glossy fashion mags are to teenage girls - full of totally false, staged and unrealistic photos, that make the normal folk who read them feel unworthy and lacking?

Or are they purely just house porn - to be read and enjoyed for the beautiful pictures and items shown in them, allowing the reader a little escapism and fantasism, to be then thrown to one side in order to get on with real life and the true realities of living in an old, money-pit of a house!

2 comments:

  1. I think I am lucky that my magazine collection has stuck to Marie Claire and Glamour! I get my home inspiration mainly from StumbleUpon! I would say home magazines are mainly house porn! Great to get colours and inspiration from but don't base your room re-arrangement on them!

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  2. So true! I particularly hate with a vengeance the children's rooms with strategically placed rocking horse and antique doll's house, and no sign at all of extensive storage solutions failing to contain garish plastic tat!

    Same thing with Grand Designs, while Kevin McCloud is raving, I am always thinking - But where is your STUFF? They may look beautiful, but without any signs of life it's all empty.

    Respect to your dad on the magazine subscriptions!
    xx

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