Distressed Stucco

Wandering through the apartments of Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, critic Robert Hughes recalled how deeply architect Le Corbusier believed that its clean-lined modernism would “improve” its inhabitants:

Nobody wanted those plain, morally-elevating interiors with paper lamps and craft rugs and slung chairs and Cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled against all his life. He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did – and they still do.

There is an direct line of descent from Corbusier’s utopian ambitions to contemporary minimalism, which reappears every decade or so in various guises: Recall, for instance, the high-end love affair with Dieter Rams’ sleek designs for Vitsœ, Ikea’s self-assembled blond-on-blond furniture lines, the lifestyle brands curated by the likes of Matha Stewart and Marie Kondo, and brief enthusiasms for minimalism, feng shui, and similar aesthetics.

And yet, like Corbusier’s aesthetically irredeemable French public, we in the United States continue wanting the gaudy, the sentimental, and the fake. Consider, for instance, a wall outside a Venice Beach house, its sandstone-hued stucco showing off fissures that reveal brickwork underneath.

For three centuries Americans (and everyone else) have nurtured a soft spot for façades that ape a French village in gentle decline. The theme extends indoors to interiors painted in terra cotta tones and then distressed in imitation craquelure. Associated decoration includes angry fencepost lions, heraldic devices embedded in vertical concrete slabs, and brass Indonesian dooknobs, door hinges, and other hardware.

I do not judge. My own tastes run to picket fences – wooden pickets, not plastic ones. Squinting, I can imagine myself living in midcentury Midwestern town. If others prefer the dowager walls of a Tuscan villa, well, more power to them.

Once upon a time, Los Angeles excelled at such fantasies. The “Snow White cottages” of the 1930s, featuring turrets and steep-sloped seemingly thatched roofs were an early example (see Atlas Obscurafor more on this). Now, of course, such eclectic miscellany characterizes the suburban edge of many cities worldwide. Call it "maximalist design," in which a residence becomes a cabinet of curiosities.

If mass and affordable housing for the homeless ever overcomes the hostility of L.A. neighborhoods, it will be designed, no doubt, for the homeless rather than by them. It will embody certain utopian ideas of improvement. Later, the government’s clients will decorate their new spaces with bric-a-brac, spoiling the social project's uniformity, The designers will complain. This is how we’ll know that their project has succeeded.