LIVING WITH MINIMALISM

Minimalism tends to be seen as something that takes over your life—all of nothing. But if you have a creaky old house, full of the flotsam of family life, all is not an option. Round us, in north London, many families manage one minimal room: the kitchen.

We’ve been in our house long enough for our children, who are 16 and 12, to have spent their lives there. On the material front, my wife and I are a classic mismatch—one hoarder, one sorter, no winner. To look at my stuff, you’d never guess I was an editor. The house is nice, but it is Victorian and narrow. The kitchen we inherited was poky, so you either crashed into each other or lugged everything into the playroom. The house seemed to be saying: you can have kids, or guests, not both.

So we found an architect (young and cheap) and a builder (neither young nor cheap), to knock out a wall and extend the kitchen out the back. Our daughter was a bookworm, so the architect turned a fireplace into a reading booth. Our son loved painting Warhammer figures, so she put in a cupboard with sliding drawers for his tiny warriors.

We made a makeshift kitchen upstairs, fled the basement, and joined the tedious ranks of people who choose to get builders in and then complain about them. The work sailed over budget and took five months, just long enough for our son to grow out of Warhammer. But we got our slice of minimalism: white walls and cupboards, glass worktops, stone floor, lashings of space and light.

As hoped, it’s the room where we can all be together, doing different things—cooking, doing homework, going on Facebook, reading the paper. But there have also been unintended consequences. The room is so bare, it can act as a sports arena. The booth never did get used for reading, but it made a great goal for a kickabout. Now we’ve added a Crazy Catch—a taut net that sends a tennis ball flying back at you, just the thing for blowing off steam after school.

The other discovery is that the room is a good work space. My wife, a teacher, sits there marking, and I write at the kitchen table. The walls are dotted with damp, and the board games bulging out of the shelves would give John Pawson palpitations. But it all works for us. The emptiness seems to clear the mind, and the air of calm seeps into family life. Space does furnish a room.

~ TIM DE LISLE

Picture Credit: jingdianjiaju2 (via Flikr)