There is an object that disappeared from Spanish homes within a generation or two, without almost anyone noticing: the living room furniture. I’m not talking about a base for the TV but about that solid wood architecture that occupied an entire wall, with its display cases, shelves, drawers, space for the TV and, in the most ambitious models, even an integrated minibar, the only thing in my childhood home that seemed like a luxury to me.
For decades that piece of furniture was the nerve center of the home. It housed books, television, mini chain (another vestige of another era), family memories and the boy’s judo medals. Today it is a relic that no one millennial buys and that Generation Z doesn’t even recognize.
The obvious explanation is practical: televisions grew much faster than the space that these pieces of furniture reserved for them. It became impossible to fit a 42 or 55 inch screen where barely 21 could fit.. Apartments shrank while prices skyrocketed, and dedicating four square meters to a cherry monolith no longer made sense.
Furthermore, moves have multiplied because job insecurity forces people to change cities more than in the past, and no one wants to carry a piece of furniture that requires a truck and three rocks. But That doesn’t explain why no one misses them..
What died with the living room furniture was something deeper: the idea that the home should display who we were. These displays were, in addition to functional display cases, a showcase: the good dishes that were only used at Christmas, the collection of porcelain figurines, the religious motifs if the family was a believer, the bound volumes of encyclopedias that no one read but that let visitors know that culture is valued in this house.
The shelf with the VHS carefully arranged, the crystal glasses, the framed photos. It was all there to be seen by those who came to see us, to say, “This is our family, this is our status, this is what we value, this is who we are.” That today is, at best, a piece of melanin furniture with some funkos and the Switch.
Image provided by an acquaintance. In this case, a 55″ TV covers more than what the furniture manufacturer had planned and there is no room for more. In this case, the tradition of furniture and tea sets coexist with the modernity of consoles, the yoga mat or souvenirs definitely different from those of yesteryear, such as the Japanese torii or the Mexican mask. Where was the ceramic with ‘Memory of Torrelavega’.
Today we exhibit on Instagram, or in our profile photo and WhatsApp statuses, but not in the living room. Identity is no longer constructed through physical objects arranged in a display case, but through selected images on a screen. It is no longer necessary to demonstrate to visitors that you have good taste (visits, in fact, are increasingly rare) because your followers They have already seen it in the stories. The other thing is a matter of our parents and in-laws.
The living room furniture was a gesture of permanence and stability: We bought one that we knew would last a lifetime, we even inherited it.
Now we live in forced flexibility, in rental apartments with annual contracts, in Ikea as religion and in the imperative to travel light. It’s not just that it doesn’t fit. It is that its very logic (the solid, the definitive, the expository) belongs to a time that no longer exists.
The space where the furniture used to be is now occupied by a giant television mounted on the wall, a minimalist shelf from Amazon or, directly, nothing. And that absence is not coincidental. It is the symptom of a culture that stopped believing in the idea of the home as a personal museum. and he began to conceive it as a provisional set for a life that happens, above all, elsewhere. On the screens.
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Featured image | Xataka
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