Why I don’t Live in a Dwell Home

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

For a long time I didn’t look at magazines. I banned them from my life because I believed that the “framed experience” of magazine ads created too much psychological dissonance. Whatever life was depicted in ads was so distant from my actual life that the gap just made me feel bad.

Now we have Facebook to make us feel bad about our lives, so, once again, I look at magazines. It’s one thing to see a picture of a man fishing for stripers along a New England shore in a boat you could never afford, it’s quite another when you know the guy’s name is “Mongo” and you once beat him in a spelling bee.

Sometimes the Boss picks up an issue of Dwell magazine for “ideas”. I don’t know what ideas you can get from reading Dwell, other than the idea that your life would look a lot better if you lived in a Scandinavian factory. I love the magazine. It has a compelling aesthetic, but I have to remind myself that not only is the world depicted in Dwell not my life… it could never be my life.

To illustrate I took a “Dwell” type photo:

Nice kitchen

And tried to show how I would screw up a Dwell house. If someone handed me a Dwell house for free, it wouldn’t look like the magazine within three weeks. My Photoshop skills are weak, so bear with me:

What I would do to a nice kitchen

Here is a recent photo from a picture of a “camp” in the wilderness that ran in the magazine.

I’ll skip the photoshopping and just tell you what is wrong with the picture.