Apartment envy

During a fairly painful conference call (is there any other kind?) this afternoon, I noticed an interesting-looking catalog on my boss' desk, from Room & Board. Their fall catalog highlights different people's homes and how they've incorporated the Room & Board furniture in their modern yet cozy yuppie spaces. Pretty couches, nice TV stand, I thought. And then I alighted upon a particularly infuriating "customer story."

Meet Lanie.



Lanie is a a "fashionable woman" who manages to "live large in less than 500 square feet."

The pages featuring Lanie's third floor walk-up (oh the humanity!) West Village apartment show all her tips on how to manage in such a painfully, painfully small space. "In such a small space, everything has to do double-duty," she says. Or something like that -- I didn't take the catalog home with me and it's not up on the website yet, so I am paraphrasing, perhaps not using direct, word-for-word quotations. (edit: back in the office, took another peek, so direct quotes below)

A third-floor walk up in Manhattan means small rooms, narrow stairwells and tight hallways, the catalog tells its readers. 'Nothing in my home is just for looks,' explains Lanie. 'Everything has to do two things.' The spread also features a floor plan, showing how lanie makes the most of "every inch in her home." Basically, they want you to know how five hundred square feet is such an impossibly cramped space that you couldn't, say, have a normal coffee table that didn't offer extra storage!

Look, I realize extra storage is always nice, and obviously, the catalog is just trying to highlight the practical uses of their very attractive but overpriced furniture while making you think that maybe you can have a little piece of Lanie's New York City dream. But come on.

Clearly, Lanie with her precious little doggy and beautiful but incredibly impractical Louboutin heels (I think that's what they are, with those red soles) is not suffering so badly. (The piece includes a little blurb about how she loves Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, too. For those unaware, Magnolia's cupcakes were featured in Sex and the City and despite that show having been over for more than three years, dumb girls continue to line up down the block like they're sprinkled with fashion fairy dust or something.)

Five hundred square feet is a very decently-sized space, especially for just one person in Manhattan. Obviously, it's less than what you'd get for the money in, say, Minnesota (where Room & Board is based) but how is that news to anyone?

I caught a similar feature on the brutal reality of apartment living on Oprah a few months back, where her designer person made over some woman's apartment and they all acted like it was a great miracle. When the audience all gasped at hearing how one person could live with just a mini-fridge, I felt the need to really hurt them. Seriously? I know Americans have come accustomed to super-sized everything, and obviously studio apartments aren't every one's cup of tea (including mine -- a bedroom with a proper door having been number one on our list of apartment requirements) but elsewhere in the world, whole families share single rooms. Lanie managing in a third-floor walk-up in a neighborhood shared with the likes of Jennifer Garner and the Sex and the City she-devil herself, Sarah Jessica Parker, hardly constitutes a miracle.

New York, I love you, but sometimes you make it very hard to be just a normal person who cannot afford (and does not desire) a multi-million dollar West Village apartment.

I guess I should really not blame Lanie. She had some cute ideas for her space and I am sure I'd be very happy living in an apartment that looked like hers. But something about the entire catalog (which also featured a retired Bay-area couple whose, ahem "minimalist hill-top house with amazing views of a seaside town in Marin County" and a Midwestern family who had some story I didn't bother to examine too closely) just felt so smug. And irritating. I would like to have a nice home someday, but I really hope to never describe it with such an obnoxious, precious tone. I want a catalog with beautiful furniture that real people can afford. I should probably just go to IKEA, but I also want it to be real furniture that has really already been put together. By someone else.