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Aesthetics are an important and understudied element of household modern material culture, especially in regard to today’s urban residential interiors. This paper examines the aesthetics demonstrated in 13 contemporary middle-class Los Angeles County houses headed by dual-earner parents with at least two children. Data were gleaned from self-narrated, videotaped home tours that each of the family members provided, as well as from other video footage and still photographs. Thematic aesthetic preferences emerged from the data. These themes include a proclivity toward sentimental or “powerful” art, premeditated modification and personalization of objects and spaces, a preference toward brightly lit and large areas, and a tendency toward carpeting only private spaces within the house. Household aesthetics can be conceived as an ever-evolving series of processes with no specifically defined goal of culmination; like specific artifacts, aesthetics have a life history of their own. Furthermore this paper shows how children tend to mimic their parents’ aesthetic preferences, as indicated by self-reportage in the home tours. |
