The Pulse and the Thud

The cable hummed a low C-sharp, vibrating against the grease-stained palm of my glove, a frequency I’ve felt in exactly 188 different elevator shafts this year. It’s a rhythmic, mechanical pulse that tells me the counterweights are balanced, the tension is precise, and the passengers in the 58-story tower above me won’t plummet into the pit where I’m currently standing. I just killed a spider with the heel of my work boot-a heavy, decisive thud against the concrete floor that echoed up the shaft. It was a messy necessity. The spider was a trespasser in a space that demands absolute mechanical purity, and for a second, I felt a strange, lingering satisfaction in that small act of destruction. It was the only real thing I’d touched all day.

Finn B.-L. is my name, and I spend my life looking at the guts of buildings that are designed to look like nothing is happening behind the walls. I see the frayed wires, the leaking hydraulics, and the 28-year-old rust that people hide with expensive veneers. But lately, it isn’t the rust that bothers me. It’s the veneers themselves. When I step out of the service lift and into the lobbies of these luxury condos, or when I go home to my own neighborhood, I feel like I’m walking through a rendering. There is a terrifying sameness creeping into our living rooms, a literal and figurative whitewashing of personality that is turning our private sanctuaries into public-facing sets.

The Algorithmic Home Aesthetic

I sat in my truck for 48 minutes after my shift, staring at a neighbor’s house across the street. They’ve just finished a renovation that cost them upwards of $68,888. It looks exactly like the 18 houses I passed on the way to work. They’ve replaced the original woodwork with white shiplap, painted the brick a flat charcoal, and installed a brass light fixture that looks like a geometric tumbleweed. It’s the ‘Modern Farmhouse’ aesthetic-a style born in a boardroom and perfected by an algorithm that rewards the least offensive visual denominator. It is a home designed not for the people living inside it, but for the 388 followers who will see the filtered photos on a screen.

We are renovating ourselves into a corner. By chasing the ‘correct’ look-a look dictated by Pinterest boards and HGTV marathons-we are stripping away the architectural friction that makes a home feel alive. We’ve traded character for ‘resale value,’ a concept that forces us to live in a perpetual state of staging for a future owner who might never arrive. My ex-wife spent 128 hours picking out a shade of white for our kitchen that ended up looking like a gallon of skim milk had exploded against the drywall. She wanted it to feel ‘airy.’ Instead, it felt like a surgical suite. There was no place for the eye to rest, no texture to catch the light, no history to lean against. It was a space designed to be looked at, but never to be inhabited.

Domestic Surveillance and The Need for Thickets

This trend towards the generic is a form of domestic surveillance. When everything is white, bright, and open-plan, there is nowhere to hide. There is no mystery. Our homes have become glass houses where we perform the most curated version of our lives. But a home should be a thicket. It should have shadows. It should have textures that demand to be touched, surfaces that tell a story beyond ‘I saw this on a blog.’ We’ve forgotten that a room needs depth to feel real. Flat paint and flat surfaces create a flat life.

I’ve seen how people try to break out of this, usually with a DIY project that involves a lot of adhesive and very little foresight. They try to add ‘interest’ with stick-on tiles or foam molding that peels off after 18 days. These are temporary band-aids on a deeper architectural wound. If you want to change the energy of a room, you have to change its physical language. You have to introduce lines, shadows, and materials that feel permanent. We need something that feels like it has a pulse, something like what Slat Solution provides, which moves beyond the superficiality of a coat of paint and actually alters the way light moves across a surface. It’s about creating a rhythm in the room, much like the rhythmic hum of the elevator cables I monitor. Without that rhythm, a space is just a void.

The Gravity of Old Materials

I remember inspecting an old hotel in the city, a building that was 108 years old. The elevator was a terrifying cage of wrought iron and brass, a beautiful, clanking monster that required 18 different manual adjustments every month. The lobby was filled with dark oak paneling and deep, velvet curtains. It was ‘dated’ by modern standards. It didn’t have a single piece of shiplap. And yet, people lingered there. They stayed in that lobby for hours, reading books and drinking coffee, because the space held them. It had gravity. The materials had weight. You could feel the 38,888 souls who had passed through those doors over the century. Contrast that with the modern lobby I visited this morning-all white marble and LED strips. People walked through it as fast as they could. It wasn’t a place to be; it was a place to pass through.

We’ve become obsessed with the idea of ‘clean lines,’ but we’ve interpreted that to mean ‘no lines at all.’ We want our walls to disappear. We want our kitchens to look like they’ve never seen a piece of raw garlic or a splash of red wine. We are scrubbing the evidence of our existence from our own homes. My neighbor, the one with the charcoal brick, once told me he was afraid to hang a picture because it would ‘ruin the flow.’ He’s living in a $588,888 museum dedicated to the fear of being seen as uncool.

The Ochre Chair

I find myself rebelling in small ways. In my own 1008-square-foot house, I’ve stopped trying to match the colors. I have a chair that I found in an alleyway 8 years ago; it’s a hideous shade of ochre, but it’s the most comfortable thing I own. I have walls that are scuffed and floors that creak in 58 different places. When I come home from a day of staring at the sterile precision of modern construction, those scuffs feel like a relief. They are the marks of a life being lived, not a life being performed.

True architectural expression isn’t about following a trend; it’s about understanding how a space makes you feel when the camera is off. It’s about the way a wood slat catches the afternoon sun and casts a series of long, rhythmic shadows across the floor. It’s about the cooling touch of stone or the rough grain of reclaimed timber. These things provide a sensory grounding that a flat, grey-painted wall never can. They remind us that we are physical beings in a physical world, not just data points in an advertising algorithm.

Building for Needs, Not Algorithms

I often think about that spider I killed. It was just doing what spiders do-building a home in a corner. It didn’t care about the aesthetic of the elevator shaft. It cared about utility, about catching its next meal, about surviving in the dark. There’s a lesson there, somewhere between the grease and the concrete. Our homes should be built for our needs, our quirks, and our messy, complicated lives. They should be built to withstand the grit of reality, not just the brightness of a flashbulb.

We need to stop asking if a renovation will increase our home’s value and start asking if it will increase our own sense of peace. We need to stop buying what everyone else is buying just because it’s the safe choice. The safest choice is often the most boring one, and life is too short to live in a house that feels like a waiting room. I’ll take the creaks, the shadows, and the weird, unmarketable textures any day. I’ll take a home that feels like it’s been lived in by 8 different versions of myself over a sterile ‘modern farmhouse’ that feels like it was delivered in a box.

The Final Angle

As I climbed out of the shaft today, the sun was setting, hitting the glass of the skyscraper at a sharp 18-degree angle. The building looked beautiful from the outside-a shimmering pillar of success. But I knew what was behind the glass. I knew about the 888 feet of cable that needed replacing and the tiny, persistent leaks in the cooling system. Everything is a performance until you look at the guts. It’s time we started looking at the guts of our homes again. It’s time we stopped renovating for the algorithm and started building for the human soul. Because at the end of the day, when the lights go down and the screen is dark, you’re the only one who has to live with the choices you’ve made. Do you want to live in a trend, or do you want to live in a home?