unseriously serious
Furniture Is Not Restrictive
The moment I moved into my own place at 18, more than anything, I was looking forward to finally not having furniture. By this I don’t mean that I wanted to furnish a home myself, but rather, I wasn’t planning on getting furniture at all.
I found a studio in midtown Manhattan (I know). The apartment was on the 33rd floor and overlooked what seemed to be the whole of New York City. This 16x16 unit was exactly what I had in mind. I put in an offer and moved in the next day.
Okay, I knew I needed some furniture. For example, I couldn’t just sleep on the floor because that wouldn’t be very comfortable. So I got two mattresses, stacked them on top of each other, and called it a bed. When friends came to stay, I’d unstack the mattresses and voilà, two beds!
The only light was in the bathroom but I felt that buying a lamp would ruin my no-furniture freedom. So, I did what any 18-year-old would do and bought the longest string of fairy lights I could find and hung them around the entire apartment. Surprisingly, this created enough light.
One evening, before I learned how to pay an electricity bill, I came home to find that the lights didn’t switch on. No problem. My friend and I went to the shop and found some balloons at CVS with LED lights in them. We blew them up and taped them around the apartment, creating a dim orange-green-purple-yellow discothèque. The only problem was that they didn’t turn off.
I also realised I needed to keep everything quite tidy since there wasn’t anywhere to store my belongings. The wardrobe was the floor, and I stacked my clothes neatly in piles along the edge. Apart from that, it all worked out quite well.
I moved out of that apartment after a year with my conviction confirmed: furniture was useless.
The next time I rented an unfurnished apartment was five years later, a one-bedroom brownstone on the Upper West Side.
The no furniture thing had worked out pretty well in the past, so again, all I got was a mattress. This time I went with a slightly different strategy, getting just one mattress but the biggest one I could find. In an ideal world it would’ve taken up the entire floor of the small bedroom.
Over dinner on the floor one night, my friends asked when I’d finally be getting furniture. I told them I wasn’t planning on getting any because I didn’t see the point.
I have enough self-awareness to see the irony in that. Clearly, it would’ve been much more comfortable to eat at a dining table. At 18, I was living alone and the novelty of it made it such that the no-furniture thing wasn’t something anyone gave a second thought to. But by 24, everyone hosted dinners where guests sat around a table, upright on chairs.
I considered rethinking the whole no furniture thing. Most people seem to take no real issue with it. Maybe there was something to furniture after all.
As a trial, I got some masking tape and traced the outlines of where the furniture would go. I tested this out for a week, pretending these areas had actual furniture, stepping around them to understand whether my freedom to move around the space would be as impacted as I had feared.
I started small. First, a chair. Then a table. Some more chairs. A sofa. Lastly, a bed-frame (though I’m still struggling to see the point in that one). Piece by piece, I filled the space with furniture, carefully evaluating each item's utility and assessing how much freedom I was sacrificing.
Here’s what I learned: not only does furniture not significantly impact your freedom to move around, it actually adds levels to the space, creating additional zones for you to occupy. I had never thought about it this way.
This is all more of a personal note to self: furniture is useful, not restrictive. Furnish the apartment.
Side note: This is an okay solution.