In every dream home

When I was young, my parents took my siblings and I to see many model homes. There was always a possibility we would move, as my mother never seemed to be happy about where we were living. A tour through a model home would offer us a glimpse of the life we could have.

Model homes were often the first three homes you would see when you entered a new development, and usually they were the only homes there. Around those model homes, of varying designs, was the empty space of a construction site. I've been to many, and they are often exactly alike in terms of the interior design. This isn't surprising given that they are trying to appeal a broad range of consumers with traditional indications of "comfort."

I recall opening the refrigerator to see whether there was any food. There was none. The only food in the house was the plastic fruit in the bowl on the kitchen table. Sometimes there would even be plastic bread and other foods laying on plates. To my siblings and I, going to a model home was somewhat like being able to snoop through someone else's house. Sadly, it was nothing like people's actual homes, as the interesting details were missing. But it sure seemed as if someone lived there.

The decoration didn't vary much model-to-model. The real estate agent would lead us around, inevitably presenting the boys room and the girls room. The girls room was uniformly pink and unnervingly tidy, the boys blue and tidy. There were cardboard books on the shelf, or if it was an actual book, it would be something generic like a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. There were child-like scrawlings on pieces of paper placed on the wall. What was eerie was not only the complete absence of the supposed denizens of this space, but how dull and typical their lives seemed. All of the model homes seemed to house the same family.

The same detritus of family life is also present in different types of showrooms across the country - I have also been to many of these - and in my boredom, tagging along begrudgingly with my mom, I'd hit the tvs of cardboard, or fiddle with the cardboard books. Something disturbed me about the books, especially, since the books seemed the pinnacle of boring, made to look like the sort of tomes lining the wall of an attorney's office. What sort of contents would be in a cardboard book anyway?

From an article in the Chicago Tribune - "The right model can conjure the emotions and mental pictures that help a builder tap into a buyer’s needs, wants and dreams." It is clear what the intention of model homes are, but in retrospect, they have their own sort of beauty, both in the representation of the ideal home life, and the eerie silence of the invisible occupants.