For most of my thirties, I had a recurring fantasy.

It involved a big-city apartment, concrete floors, and walls so stark and empty they were almost unsetlling.

Something like this…

No toys underfoot. No sneakers by the back door. No perpetual hodgepodge of sippy cup lids and valves drying on the kitchen counter.

I dreamed of a sleek, uncluttered space the way other guys dream about a Porsche 911 or a Rolex Submariner.

Here’s why: our house was a mess.

Not a bad mess, per se. I mean, it wasn’t dirty.

It was the mess that comes with four kids and a life lived in constant motion.

Colorful plastic toys in every room. Dress-up dresses in the hallway. The steady stream of laundry. Backpacks that never made it to the hook. Sneakers in a pile by the door. You get it.

In the middle of all that, a stark white apartment sounded like what my brain and soul needed.

So I held onto the fantasy, and figured that by the time the kids were grown, that’s the life we’d adopt.

An empty nest would give us a literally clean slate of crisp walls and clean lines.

A sanctuary with no distractions or stimulation from the environment.

I’ve come to find out I was completely wrong about what I actually wanted.

A Surprise Twist

Flash forward and the kids are older now.

A couple of them are starting lives of their own.

The Fisher Price toys, the DVD cases and Wii games, the pop-up princess castle? All humanely re-homed.

But here’s the part I didn’t see coming. As we graduate from the years with younger kids, we haven’t moved toward the sleek white apartment.

We’ve gone the other way entirely.

We’ve taken a hard turn into maximalism.

And…I don’t hate it.

What Gets to Stay

If there’s an underlying message of maximalism, it’s this: a house should look like somebody lives there.

But not just somebody. It should look like you live there.

It should reflect your interests and hobbies. It should tell the story of the places you’ve been. It should offer a glimpse into what you’ve studied, what makes you laugh, and what’s interesting enough to look at again and again.

This house looks like we live in it…

Maximalism later in life hits different, and I think I’ve figured out why.

I think some of it is because we’re at the age where we’re losing parents, and we’re faced with culling through the things they accumulated. Whether we wanted to be or not, people in this stage of life are suddenly flush with heirlooms and sentimental items.

As such, there’s a process of curating and editing (and let’s be very clear: throwing shit into dumpsters) that forces you to confront what you have, what it means to you, and what you’re going to do with it.

When you’re younger, you want your house to look like a fresh start. By the time you’ve been kicked around by life a little, you want your house to tell your story.

RIP Minimalism

I’m not knocking minimalism. I still love a clean line and a quiet room.

I just don’t want to live that way right now.

Not when the alternative is a house full of things that mean something to us, like pottery from a kid’s ceramic class, a great aunt’s old piano, the stack of books we’ll get to, and the weird little nicknacks that make this place our home.