On minimalism…and stuff

I can tell when someone has cleaned up the house specifically in preparation for an interview or a photo shoot. Typically, the hallway and bedroom doors are closed.

I always imagine them holding back a swell of clothes and clutter like the Hoover Dam.

Everyone is familiar with this routine. The act of “straightening up” for company quickly becomes an exhaustive exercise of ridding the kitchen, den and dining room of each inessential object—everything in its right place.

Not Trey Trahan. He’s already done that.

We met in person four times over the course of several months while I researched and wrote this month’s cover story. For our final interview, the architect invited me to his Beauregard Town home, just a short walk from his firm’s North Boulevard office.

Like the stark, bare walls of his workspace, the interior of Trahan’s dwelling reveals a deep-rooted faith in the power of less.

Trahan is a minimalist. He’s a huge art lover, too—particularly African folk art, because, as he says, “it was created for ritual and not just for art’s sake”—but not a single painting or photograph or piece of decorative flair hangs on his walls. The only artwork is seen in windows framing the aged oaks and blue skies beyond the glass.

“I sketch a lot here, so I’ll come home, sit at the table, and I just want to get away from stuff and objects,” Trahan told me.

We know that at the heart of every packrat lies a deep nostalgia for stuff, and by extension, the people, places and memories those things recall. Just don’t expect a contemporary designer to reach for the tissue box about any of it.

“Contemporary architects are not as nostalgic or emotional about those things,” architect David Baird told me by phone from Las Vegas, where the former LSU architecture instructor now serves as dean of the School of Design at UNLV. “We’re about solving problems and celebrating how we live today and not relying exclusively on what’s been done in the past. There’s a strong optimism embedded in that.”

Last fall, I asked star interior designer Kenneth Brown for one tip to improve any room. “Remove a third of the stuff in it,” he replied.

But minimalism can be about more than throwing things out to avoid starring in an episode of Hoarders. It can mean a total reassessment of priorities.

Do our lives need white space as much as the walls of our homes do?

With the rise of Real Simple and GOOD magazines, popular blogs like Miss Minimalist, Everyday Minimalist and the new hit borrowing site Neighbor Goods, this form of holistic paring down is trending. Look at the success of the music service Spotify. Those listeners are happy to be renters, not owners; samplers, not archivists.

Journalist and entrepreneur Sean Bonner likes to give speeches about how we buy too many things. But he’s not against making and spending money. A recovering collector, Bonner’s advice is to stop spending money on buying things and start spending it on doing things. Collect experiences, not objects.

Anti-materialism advocates like to say, “Less is more.” After talking with Trahan, that axiom seems incomplete. It has to be, because every implication of the word “less” cannot be defined as the opposite of abundant.

Maybe less isn’t more.

Maybe less is simply better.