When asked to imagine a $15,000-a-night penthouse in the heart of Manhattan, chances are most would conjure up images of Ritz-Carlton opulence with gilded furniture, champagne flutes and satin drapery, or maybe a modern Tribeca loft with high ceilings and designer chairs.
Few would likely imagine unvarnished unadorned walls, worn farmers market tabletops, low lighting and humility. Yet when Robert De Niro and his business partner Ira Drukier tapped interior designer Axel Vervoordt to refresh the penthouse of the Greenwich Hotel, that’s the direction they chose.
Granted, Vervoordt and Japanese architect Tatsuro Miki fought many battles over the two-and-a-half year process to ensure their vision wasn’t compromised, but the final result speaks to their success: it’s beautiful, totally refreshing and, somehow, far more aspirational than a Ritz suite or a Tribeca loft.
That signals an interesting cultural shift. This penthouse is stripped of almost all traditional symbols of luxury, and looks more like a rural European home of the ‘50s than a beacon of Manhattan high society. Yet, guests are doling out thousands and thousands of dollars a night precisely for the humility and quietude it provides.
Or: for the absence of noise, and the absence of things it provides. It isn’t an isolated case, either – ‘absence’ has, over the past few years, become the hottest of luxury commodities. We are being sold an absence of GMOs in Whole Foods produce, an absence of noise in Amtrak silent cars, an absence of data in cloud encryption software, and the list goes on.
That’s not entirely unexpected. Luxury, after all, is in part defined by rarity and exclusivity and is, in that sense, intrinsically contextual: whatever is widely available and democratic at any given time is not luxurious. What is at once rare and desirable is.
And here we are, after decades of ‘more, more, more’, with more everything than we need. More access, more communication, more attention, notifications a-plenty and instant anything. We have created a world so full of ‘more’ that all we no longer have is what was once naturally ours—silence, privacy, space, time. It’s no surprise, then, to see the luxury industry now glamorizing minimalism the way it once glamorized excess.
This of course is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In many ways, less is better than more, especially when it is accompanied by a better understanding of provenance and of the use of resources. Still, a simple redirection of consumerism to concepts like ‘slow living’ in many ways defeats their purpose. If a slower, simpler life is the goal, understanding the commodification of absence and minimalism is key to making it work.
In its simplest form, German philosopher Hegel’s pendulum theory states that progress is the result of a cultural pendulum, where events swing from one extreme to the other before coming to rest in the middle—where progress lies. This suggests the ‘luxurification’ of minimalism is still in its early stages, and more digital detox getaways, bare homes and Blue Hill meals are on the way. Affordable versions will multiply, with Muji no doubt leading the revolution, before we, maybe, strike the middle ground.
When asked to imagine a $15,000-a-night penthouse in the heart of Manhattan, chances are most would conjure up images of Ritz-Carlton opulence with gilded furniture, champagne flutes and satin drapery, or maybe a modern Tribeca loft with high ceilings and designer chairs.
Few would likely imagine unvarnished unadorned walls, worn farmers market tabletops, low lighting and humility. Yet when Robert De Niro and his business partner Ira Drukier tapped interior designer Axel Vervoordt to refresh the penthouse of the Greenwich Hotel, that’s the direction they chose.
Granted, Vervoordt and Japanese architect Tatsuro Miki fought many battles over the two-and-a-half year process to ensure their vision wasn’t compromised, but the final result speaks to their success: it’s beautiful, totally refreshing and, somehow, far more aspirational than a Ritz suite or a Tribeca loft.
That signals an interesting cultural shift. This penthouse is stripped of almost all traditional symbols of luxury, and looks more like a rural European home of the ‘50s than a beacon of Manhattan high society. Yet, guests are doling out thousands and thousands of dollars a night precisely for the humility and quietude it provides.
Or: for the absence of noise, and the absence of things it provides. It isn’t an isolated case, either – ‘absence’ has, over the past few years, become the hottest of luxury commodities. We are being sold an absence of GMOs in Whole Foods produce, an absence of noise in Amtrak silent cars, an absence of data in cloud encryption software, and the list goes on.
That’s not entirely unexpected. Luxury, after all, is in part defined by rarity and exclusivity and is, in that sense, intrinsically contextual: whatever is widely available and democratic at any given time is not luxurious. What is at once rare and desirable is.
And here we are, after decades of ‘more, more, more’, with more everything than we need. More access, more communication, more attention, notifications a-plenty and instant anything. We have created a world so full of ‘more’ that all we no longer have is what was once naturally ours—silence, privacy, space, time. It’s no surprise, then, to see the luxury industry now glamorizing minimalism the way it once glamorized excess.
This of course is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In many ways, less is better than more, especially when it is accompanied by a better understanding of provenance and of the use of resources. Still, a simple redirection of consumerism to concepts like ‘slow living’ in many ways defeats their purpose. If a slower, simpler life is the goal, understanding the commodification of absence and minimalism is key to making it work.
In its simplest form, German philosopher Hegel’s pendulum theory states that progress is the result of a cultural pendulum, where events swing from one extreme to the other before coming to rest in the middle—where progress lies. This suggests the ‘luxurification’ of minimalism is still in its early stages, and more digital detox getaways, bare homes and Blue Hill meals are on the way. Affordable versions will multiply, with Muji no doubt leading the revolution, before we, maybe, strike the middle ground.