perfect empty houses, Marie Kondo and the organization of the spaces

According to a common place, architects create beautiful but impractical spaces that are difficult to keep in order like those on magazine covers.
Except for projects created for formal reasons, for professional research and deliberately “emptied” to the bone, I want to break a lance in favor of the will to purify frills.

The Japanese Marie Kondo made her fortune on this subject. She looks a bit crazy, but in fact she is very persuasive and, if commensurate, her lessons are very useful.

Like Marie Kondo, like everyone else?, I was a messy person, but who actually loves order. Over the years I have found a way to resist this tendency of mine, which is very simply solved by reducing the quantity of objects in the house to the essential, so as not to be dependent on having to always clean / tidy up.

Why? You could agree with me that:

• the presence of well-made objects returns good humor: things that you like, that are beautiful and work good, restores harmony and serenity. Consequently it is necessary to surround oneself with objects that are in adherence with one’s person and to throw / donate the rest.
• an environment poor in objects and well organized allows greater concentration and visual immediacy. It is more restful, functional, it underlines shapes and colors of the house – as if a background noise had been eliminated. it allows to recover badly used spaces, it reduces cleaning times.
• realizing how many objects we buy, without really needing them, is a small lesson that we give ourselves against waste when we begin to get rid of all the non-necessary.

Focusing on the objects around us, making space, is one of those things we do automatically, without a real intention.
In a more incisive and radical way, an architect organizes the spaces of everyday life, doing an operation of simplification and cleaning putting himself in the customer’s shoes. Imagine his movements and returns solutions, technical and aesthetic.

A practical example. The following is a photo of a bathroom before the renovation I followed (in the works list: casa BVM).

2,2 sq. m. In front of the sanitary ware, there is a very small shoe rack, on which other shoe boxes are stacked.

The clients were very tidy, but the layout of the furnishings and bathroom fixtures inevitably brought into view several objects to be weekly cleaned / ordered / dusted .
Discordant colors, not well studied lights (cold / hot together), sanitary fixtures immediately visible when opened, return a sense of disorder.

The project did not provide for the enlargement of the size of the bath, nor required the elimination of all personal belongings. But it reorganizes them.

Although at first glance the bathroom seemed too small to organize it in any other way, by studying every centimeter, it was possible to move the sanitary ware to the opposite wall and organize a very large wardrobe on the opposite side.
With the same square meters, it was possible to obtain a larger washbasin, a wardrobe larger than the previous one and all the personal effects at hand but not in sight.

If well organized, no space is ever small and unusable.