Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Time to scale back

Recovering 'decor addict' calls for end to cult of house and garden

By WOODY HOCHSWENDER
Chicago Tribune

If you are one of those people who resist the idea of having a state-of-the-art home, periodically ripping up your kitchen and bathrooms and filling up Dumpsters with discarded walls, floors, sinks, appliances — many of them perfectly good — then meet a kindred spirit: Dan Ho, a Chicago refugee and editor of Rescue magazine, as in “Rescue From House Gorgeous.”

Headlines from recent issues of his magazine and Web site include: “Let’s Make Love, Not Crap,” “Perfect Is So 90s,” “Decks Don’t Matter” and “Step Away From the Glue Gun.” In a media marketplace where every page of advertising (and, alas, sometimes editorial) seems dedicated to getting the reader to buy, buy, buy, Ho insists over and over, no, no, no — Don’t spend the money!”

Ho is the avatar of no. That is, no to excess, no to perfection, no to designer obsession. Your dream home, he says, far from fulfilling you, is probably sucking the life out of you. Master suite, gourmet kitchen, focal points, aromatherapy. For Ho, they can all be summed up in one word: crap.

Do you dream of polished granite counters and enormous stainless-steel, double-door refrigerators? Is your idea of great vacation reading the latest upscale cookbook? Is decoupage your idea of fun? Do you find yourself oohhing and ahhing over a new toilet? Then Ho, who understands your obsessions (he once shared them), has a therapeutic alternative, which he calls “smalling your way to a larger life.”

“Style is knowing what matters,” says Ho. He’s for personal style and against expensive makeovers. (Ho sponsors an ongoing essay contest entitled: “I don’t need a makeover; I just need a new couch.”) He dislikes television shows like “Extreme Makeover,” which typically features a complete teardown of a home, followed by a set-piece scene on the front lawn with joyous tears from the fortunate family.

“I find the whole idea that you’ll have the life you always wanted if you have the right house — the plasma TV in every room — ridiculous,” he says. “There is a renovation mania that unfortunately is replacing thought. The ritual objects of lifestyle have replaced the thought processes. I believe you have to work from the inside out.”

How did Ho, 37, an ex-Chicagoan and former decor bore — he once had a fabulous restaurant and a perfect house — come to take such a dyspeptic view of today’s home-decorating craze?

It began with an epiphany. One day, exhausted by the demands of the postmodern lifestyle, with its endless touts and tips, he felt as if his head was going to explode. And that is, literally, almost what happened.

He and his wife, Jenny, an award-winning Chicago chef and one of the founding members of Corner Bakery, were settling in with a new restaurant, slinging expensive tuna tartare and vine-ripened tomatoes to a sophisticated weekender clientele in Harbor Country, Mich. They owned a large, custom-built house complete with a Rumford fireplace, enormous Pella French doors, a “reading area,” a 60-foot pool and two acres of gardens whose annual upkeep “could send a child to college,” he recalls. The carpenters’ nail guns had stopped. The drywall dust had settled. The restaurant’s shipment of palm trees had just come in. An eerie calm prevailed. Suddenly, one evening as the restaurant prepared to serve dinner, Ho began seeing double, then went into convulsions, and finally was hospitalized. Months of tests followed, and Ho now refers to the seizure as “an electrical storm inside my head.” It was not a scene out of the Williams-Sonoma catalog.

“It was an out-of-body experience,” Ho says. “When I came back, I took a look at this picture-perfect existence and realized something was missing.” He began to question everything, especially a life devoted to living the perfect life, with its myriad material responsibilities.

Ho sold the restaurant and moved far from the glad-handing crowd, to the relative wilds of Portland, Maine, where he and his wife found refuge from the high-style demands of modern living.

Instead of spending another minute fussing over his house and his restaurant, Ho was determined to turn that energy inward, resulting in various publishing ventures, including his memoir/autobiography, “Rescue From House Gorgeous.”

So, is the under-decorated life worth living?

“I am infinitely happier and much more fulfilled today than I ever was,” says Ho, who lives in a modestly refurbished 19th century brownstone in downtown Portland. When he redid his kitchen, instead of going to Sub-Zero, he bought everything from Sears. In place of the deluxe, built-in gas outdoor grill from his previous existence, he now has a Weber charcoal kettle chained to his back porch. “You know, the steak tastes better,” he says.

His magazines — Rescue is published bimonthly; Relief Digest appears twice a year — provide step-by-step instructions on how to de-stylize, to step off the aromatherapied, slipcovered path. They also specialize in simple solutions to life’s challenges, like making a homemade Valentine for two cents or using coffee filters to polish glassware.

He’s against garlic presses (“get a knife and cutting board”), multiwick candles (“overpriced wax that burns unevenly”) and novelty pasta extruders, food dehydrators, etc. He is for canned sweet-pea salad and custom-made gift wrappings, printed out on your home computer.

“We’re different than Real Simple and Martha Stewart Living,” Ho says. “So much of modern style is an ordained kind of hedonism. But if you couch the whole exercise in terms of family values, it’s somehow supposed to be all right.”

Besides his magazines, Ho’s projects include plans for a cable television program to celebrate the everyday, the reasonable and the virtues of common sense.

This could be the start of something small.