What We Love About Old Homes Tells Us About Ourselves

I subscribe to a social media feed called “I Love Old Homes” because I have an appreciation for the history of architecture, especially that which was built in what is now the United States between the late 17th Century and the 1930s.  At the risk of coming off as weird, I try to picture myself living in some of these places, and some of these daydreams are quite pleasant indeed.

At left, we see something from the “beaux arts movement” in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century that I find abhorrent.  In its essence, it says that I have disdain for those less fortunate.

You don’t have a fireplace to keep you warm as you walk up one of your many staircases?  What a tragedy.

We live in times when 1.5 billion people can’t get a glass of clean water and you want to live like this?  You don’t care that the planet we live on is becoming more inhospitable with each passing year, as long as you can live in the most extreme upper end of luxury?  There are rooms in your house that you’ve never even stepped in?  Some that you can’t actually find?

Apparently this works for some, but not for me.