It’s not so much about stuff. It’s about subtracting it when you have a minimalist take on life.
And guess what? Those who live lean think about stuff as much as “stuffaholics” do. Only they also think a lot about the “what” and the “why” of the things they have purposefully chosen.
In this installment of our All Stuffed Up series, we look at what it’s like to live lean. But it’s important to put preconceived notions of the minimalist home away.
“Impossible to do with children.”
“Minimalist style is naked and cold.”
“One-channel thinking, obsessed with neatness.”
Put this thinking in a drawer or closet. It’s not true.
You can live this way and have a home that has soul, space and tranquility — even with a toddler with calypso music wriggling in her body from head to toe. It may not be for everyone, but it’s something to think about.
When we stepped into the Prairie-style home of Glenn and Venna O’Brien, we wanted to see what lean living looked like — especially for them. They have a 2 1/2-year-old daughter.
Remember: “Impossible with children.”
Their daughter, Natalie, was eager to lead a tour of the house. The first stop, naturally, was her playroom.
“[Come] with me, Pamwa,” she said walking on bare tippy-toes and looking over her shoulder to make sure the adults were in line. Natalie had come from an afternoon concert of calypso music. The music was still moving in her, especially her feet. She skipped, twirled and left a trail of giggles to follow her into the room.
The O’Briens are blessed with space. They live in a 4,200-square-foot home. But they have chosen to leave much of it open and free.
It’s perfect for Natalie as she twirls and skips across the hardwood floors of the family room and kitchen into the carpeted playroom.
Her toys and games are stored on shelves in the closet in this room. She goes in and out of the closet chatting in her on-the-verge-of-talking way about her toys and games.
When she loses interest in the adults and a Winnie the Pooh video playing on the television, she concentrates on a wooden toy house.
“We don’t feel the need to fill every inch of the house. This is what we really wanted,” says Glenn, 46, who is a sales and marketing consultant. “We wanted space.”
The O’Briens have been married four years. As single professionals they led busy lives and had their own condos.
When they got married and merged their lives, they wanted and needed help in getting control of their home and new life together.
So they called in a professional organizing service — Chicago-based White Space.
“I wasn’t raised like this,” says Venna O’Brien, founder and owner of Venna Johnson Specialties, a snack and candy brokerage company. “I was a little bit more about keeping treasures that might be something that my child might want some day. So I saved a lot of things. Glenn wasn’t as much about that. Half of the things that I thought were treasures really weren’t. There were things that I needed to let go. We downsized, donated and gave away a lot. It was hard to go through that process. But now I cannot remember what we gave away. I thought I would miss it. And I’m surprised I don’t.”
The couple agrees the organization process took them through not only a physical process but also “a mental process where all of a sudden you become mentally organized at home and how you proceed about your day.”
“They worked with us in the beginning and set things up,” says Venna, 42. “But it hasn’t been about someone still coming in and doing it all for us.”
“There are organizing systems in place and we follow them because it makes our lives so much easier,” Glenn adds. “I tweaked my closet system to fit the way I do things, but it all works for us.”The couple says they are motivated to keep their home on the lean side because it gives them the mental and physical space to enjoy each other and their family.
“For me, it’s been cleansing. I feel it is cleansing in a liberating way,” Venna says. “We don’t get caught up in all the stuff.”
Approaching stuffless in Chicago
Similarly it’s impossible to get caught up in stuff at the North Side home of Ken Des Jardins and Travis Hunerdosse. Here, there is peace and there is quiet.
For Des Jardins, 39, and Hunerdosse, 30, living lean in their small Victorian home is an extension of who they are. Although Hunerdosse claims he has to work at keeping the piles down, we wouldn’t have noticed the small pile of magazines and catalogs on the floor next to the desk in their study if he hadn’t pointed it out.
When we kicked off our All Stuffed Up series in January with a survey asking people how they dealt with stuff, we saw various ranges of stuffaholism on the stuff-o-meter.
Des Jardins, one of the 5,450 respondents, described himself as being “lean and mean about it.”
“My non-stuffaholism is an act of rebellion against my fill-every-available-space-with-something parents. To me, a sparse home is a tranquil home,” he wrote. “It’s exhausting for me to visit my parents because there’s no place for my eyes to rest. Even the end tables have newspaper clippings, photographs and inspirational messages displayed under glass tabletops.”
The first thing you notice about Des Jardins and Hunerdosse’s home is how peaceful it looks, feels and sounds.
There are the sounds of water gurgling in the aquarium that sits in the corner of the living room and the gentle ticking of clocks — the grandfather clock in the front hall and the cuckoo clock on a dining room wall. The ticking of the clocks seems as natural as heartbeats. So much so that when the cuckoo chimes and “cuckoos” on the hour, it is not obtrusive and feels like a natural rhythm in the main body of this two-story house.
Throughout the rooms on the home’s first floor, two large paintings by students of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Parisian poster found in New York decorate the walls. With little other ornamentation in these rooms and a good deal of wall space between the artworks, they take their turns grabbing your attention, giving your eyes a soothing place to rest at each stop.
A sculptural vase of white and pink tulips from their garden sits on the dining table, echoing the flowers in the nearby painting and making the room a study of tranquility and elegance.
The space is cozy, 1,800-square-feet total, and serene downstairs and up.
In a second-floor bedroom, Hunerdosse settles into a chair next to a bay window to read a book. The neighboring houses sit back a bit from the street, so his view from this perch is of lush treetops. Around him, you’ll find furniture pieces that you would expect in most bedrooms. But in Hunerdosse and Des Jardins’ home, all the surfaces are clear. Save for a few sentimental favorites such as the small statue of Buddha that sits under the shade of a wooden lamp on a nightstand (a simple reminder of peace and tranquility, they say). There are also two small pictures on the nightstand — one a framed black-and-white image of the steps leading to the gardens at the Palace of Versailles and the other an image of a watercolor painting of the inside of a cathedral (Des Jardins found the image on a trip to France).
“It all says peace to us,” Des Jardins says. Their cat Cleo lends her feline grace to the corner of the bed. She rests on her haunches as still as the little Buddha on the nightstand. Her green gemstone eyes gaze through the doorway into the hall.
“It’s nice when we come home from work. It’s peaceful here,” Des Jardins says.
An oasis of calm
Peace — or at least a reprieve from the hectic pace of work life and commitments — is what a lot of Lean and Meaners seek in their homes. Cynthia Vranas and Keith Olsen of Olsen Vranas Architect, a firm that does residential and commercial projects, are examples of this.
In addition to their architecture firm, Vranas also teaches business practices for interior design at Harrington College of Design. Both agree that relief is needed.
Thanks to music and original art, their three-story townhome delivers — with choice, well-placed objects that are meaningful and embody their pasts.
“If we didn’t have things that did this, it would feel very scary for both of us,” says Vranas, 43. “If you exclude everything from your past, it would be ridding you of yourself.”
An ebony baby grand piano — Vranas is an accomplished classical pianist — is a focal point in their living room. There are other things in this space that your eye and mind rests on: a trio of watercolors by artist-friend Sioban Nora Lombardi, a tapestry by another artist-friend Laura Nicholson, a bowl and a glass-top table by Gene Summers, who studied under Mies van der Rohe and became his chief assistant, and three chairs designed by another Mies disciple.
These furniture designs, along with two leather chairs and a woven rattan chair — were given to Olsen by Mies’ former students and have special meaning to the couple.
A book of daily meditations sits on the glass table and small Greek icons of Saints Peter and Paul and the Madonna and Child are in the living room.
And there’s enough dance floor space (sliding glass doors between the living room and terrace extend it even more) for Olsen, 56, to take out his box of 1960s and ’70s vinyl records — hidden under the stairs — for a spin.
A new chapter
The presence of Vranas and her husband is felt throughout their 1,800-square-foot home, which they share with their Maltese dog, Phoebe. The couple is expecting a baby in October, so the home has the feeling of movement and beginnings.
Plans are being made to paint the baby’s room, but even with things moved around there is order about this home.
“I tend to think that physical minimalism that tends to do with design or environment could be different than a lifestyle or a metaphysical process,” Olsen says. “I think you can have a very elaborate or encumbered life in the sense of the things that you do or the kinds of involvement you have socially, intellectually and still be in an environment that provides a relief from that kind of elaboration.”
And it’s still in keeping with the way that Olsen and Vranas were educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It’s also in keeping with the way Vranas grew up in Chicago’s predominantly Greek neighborhood near Oak Park.
While their neighbors’ homes were filled with decorative furnishings and ornamentation, “my mother was a young woman who believed form follows function, and to her, black and white were great colors. We grew up with white carpet and clean-lined black furniture.”
And four siblings, two grandparents, two dogs and two cats.
“I remember how our home felt, and even with all the activity and family, it was peaceful,” she says.
Vranas and Olsen are readying their home for family life — maybe not as large as the family she grew up in, still the baby will change things.
But Vranas and Olsen believe this new chapter in their lives can still be on the lean side. They have picked a pale pink, which serves as a neutral, for the baby’s room. The color is that peaceful shade of pink — for boy or girl — that streaks the sky at dusk. It works with the sky and trees that are seen from the upstairs bedroom windows.
Foot traffic is not seen from the windows in the home — only trees and sky.
And the baby’s room will have a crib and a dresser.
“And there will be soft toys,” Vranas says.
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More stuff to come
Next
July 10: War of the Stuff Worlds. When a Lean and Meaner lives with a Stuffed and Prouder, life can be filled with arguments and tension.
Previous stories
– Stuffaholic or minimal maniac? That’s what we asked readers in our unscientific survey. (SeeHome&Garden, Jan. 16.)
– Sending Out an SOS. Sixty-four percent of the 5,450 people who responded to our unscientific survey are hopeful and helpless when it comes to their relationship with the stuff in their lives. (SeeHome&Garden, Jan. 30.)
– Taming the paper tiger. Some advice on handling the stuff that overwhelms us — paper, books and clothing. (See Home&Garden, March 6.)
– The Inheritance. What to do with the things we inherit from loved ones? (See Home&Garden, April 10)
– Stuffed and Proud. Having stuff isn’t all bad, say these folks who are swimming in stuff and couldn’t be happier. (See Home&Garden, May 8)
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psherrod@tribune.com
