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Yet another tradition being destroyed by millenials
I'm a millennial and a woodworker, and I kinda need to rant a little.
I hate dining room hutches/cupboards.
My parents asked me to design and build a cupboard for their dining room. As I started looking around on the internet for design ideas to mash together into something that fits their whole deal, I started noticing a pattern. There are three kinds of pictures of hutches on the internet:
- The cabinet is empty floating in a white void or has a few props on it in a sparsely furnished room, for marketing the cabinet itself.
- Grandma's old cabinet full of floral print china that may not have once ever served a meal in 70 years.
- A diorama of basic bitchery, typically hosted on Pinterest, featuring distressed white chalk paint, several pieces of Rae Dunn crockery, a word like "Gather" made of scroll sawn wood, and a ceramic pig.
I cannot find any photographic evidence that 21st century Americans use dining room hutches to store things they regularly use. And I fucking hate it. It's nothing but a trophy case to consumerism. "Here's the thousand dollar cabinet we keep dishes in that will NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES touch food."
It's one facet of my "household furniture has cancer" belief. I'll show you another of those facets:
There will never be an antique computer desk because no one really makes new heirloom computer desks. The woodworking traditions that gave us things like the shaker table and the morris chair kinda died during WWII and are now practiced the same way we practice jousting or flint knapping: something something living history. When PC's became widespread in the 90's, you see three kinds of computer desk arise:
- Just a table someone already had that doesn't have enough room so there's another table next to it and stuff on the floor.
- An abstract stack of laminated particle board slabs held up by steel tubes designed for the purpose but still didn't have room for everything.
- A stack of laminated particle board slabs designed to look like an executive pillar desk, a weird combination of a pillar desk with a dining room hutch, or an armoire for some reason.
Then the laptop era happened, then the phone/tablet era happened, now look back at what PC gamers are using with their monitors and towers: A wooden slab with metal T shaped legs.
I could say the same for other electronics-related furniture such as television stands. No notable crafts movement has emerged to fill the needs of 21st century lives, everyone buys flat packed particle board crap that is meant to look like one kind of furniture while being something else, like an "entertainment center" that looks like a credenza or the aforementioned computer desk that looks like an armoire.
I hate it, and I plan to take to my table saw and do something about it.
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I don't want fancy plates and stuff. If I can't afford to use it I can't afford it.
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Did you never see the weird computer desks in the 90s that had hidden monitor spaces inlayed into them? Several of my friends' parents had desks where you lifted a trap door in the desk and the monitor would be staring up at you, or cabinets you opened and it was in there.
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Hey, if it's any consolation, I use my hutch in my kitchen area to store my cookbooks, small gardening tools, and ferment my shrubs/apple cider vinegar. I use that thing all the time, and tbh it's one of the more actively useful pieces of furniture I own, outside my couch and bookshelves. They are super useful still imo, but I guess that depends on the person using it 🤷🏻♀️
The operating phrase there is "in my kitchen area." Kitchens are heavily influenced by the practical demands of life so they remain fairly well optimized. Surface, cabinet and drawer space in kitchens is always helpful. I have a hutch-like microwave stand that stores my cat food, my bartending and coffee accoutrements and some lesser used kitchen tools. My soup crocks, a keepsake growler and a couple other vessels live on top of the microwave.
On the other side of the wall from this is a decorative cabinet full of generational clutter I am required to maintain because "It was your grandmothers." The second my father is no longer able to check, that cabinet is going elsewhere.