The viewer can click through images of people's homes that they have uploaded and see people's different tastes, level of tidiness etc. The founder of this website is photographer Anssi Koskinen. The images are not shot professionally and the majority are blurred and with bad lighting, but the whole point is that people can show their homes exactly as they are. Of course, there are some images that are of perfectly designed, clean and tidy rooms, but the majority are just normal people with normal houses. Here are some examples of images taken from the site.
"See how people live around the world! Explore the variety of lifestyles and cultural peculiarities!
Normal Room shows you interior design and home furniture from all around the globe. Search our image database and explore the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries."
This website is mentioned in an article by Hannah Booth for the Guardian, titled The Normal Way of Living. It focuses on how real people who live in real houses react to the constant pressure to keep our interior design on trend. She looks at the book Living Normally (which I also mentioned earlier on this blog) and the way that homes are meant to be lived in, not looked at. This is something that is running along in the background of this project, the idea that our homes are places that change and adjust with us over the years. Here is an extract from this article:
"...that, of course, would prove that we humans are pretty much the same wherever you go. Beds, plants, bookshelves, curled up cats: what stands out on normalroom.com is that our homes are so similar. "The site is a reaction to the homes you see in design magazines," says Koskinen. "Why do these have no signs of life? I wanted to show homes as they really are, revealing something about that person and the culture they live in. And I wanted to encourage people to discuss the social, cultural and political aspects of living - how our homes affect our lifestyles, and vice versa."(full article can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/mar/15/shopping.homes)
What Koskinen notes about how homes shown as they really are, mess and all, can reveal something about the person or people living there really strikes a chord with what I am trying to portray with my project. I am trying to show my house as it has been affected by my family living there, and how our tastes evolving over the years have left a place that is full of evidence of our past. In my dissertation I am focusing on memories and nostalgia, and for me, a house that has been lived in for 30 years by the same family is filled with memories. Therefore, by documenting it as it is now, and showing, as Koskinen puts it "signs of life", I hope to show a home that has grown to be as diverse as the memories I associate with it.
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