Wallpaper, Brown Furniture, Air Purifiers, and Changing Aesthetic Tastes

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss wallpaper, William Morris, Cath Kidston, “brown furniture,” shifting antique values, and the tension between beauty and prestige. The conversation moves through Jacobsen’s Kyiv apartment, practical cleaning experience, air purifiers, particulate pollution, and how domestic aesthetics intersect with memory, class, utility, daily urban risk.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Different for this one. Have you had any experience with wallpapering? Putting up wallpaper? I mean, actual wallpaper?

Rick Rosner: Yes. Only very little. We have a floral, very 90s floral border in our bedroom, and I have had to mess with that a little bit, but not to any significant extent. I know some of the issues with wallpapering because I have seen movies where people are fucking around with wallpaper. I think I do. But no, not really.

Jacobsen: Well, aesthetic selection of wallpaper.

Rosner: Oh, yeah. Because my wife and I, and particularly our kid, are interested in period graphics, historical graphics. And so, yeah, I feel like I have some sense of wallpaper aesthetics. There was a designer more than a hundred years ago named William Morris. Our family has looked at a lot of his stuff. Why are you asking?

Jacobsen: I am just curious. I am just asking.

Rosner: Well, okay.

Jacobsen: It is a conversational series that has been going on for more than a decade.

Rosner: No, no, I did not. That just seemed very specific, like you were in a wallpaper situation.

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: Yeah, I've probably done more thinking about wallpaper patterns than most people. Where are you going? So there is the floral aesthetic, right? And it is easy to go wrong there because you can pick something beautiful, but it is...

Jacobsen: See? Right there.

Rosner: What?

Jacobsen: I am going to take five seconds there for a side comment. The part right there, where you are like, "Well, the thing is..." Right there, you have a conversation. That is why I bring these topics up.

Rosner: Okay, yeah.

Jacobsen: Eventually, I hit something, and you go, "Well, let me tell you my opinion." Perfect!

Rosner:  Anyway, so with wallpaper, there are a bunch of beautiful patterns to be had, but you can sabotage yourself because you may pick something that has the wrong connotation, that refers too much to the 50s or to a dowdy old lady or to a grandma apartment that smells bad.

There is a company and designer that my whole family loves named Cath Kidston, out of England. So much so that my wife and I walked into a Cath Kidston store, and she broke into tears at how lovely she found everything. It's very much a heightened postwar English aesthetic. Postwar England was a fucking mess, but aesthetically it evokes an idealized 1950s, maybe even 1930s, floral style, highly decorative. Carole loves it. I find it very nice.

Our kid likes it quite a bit, but the danger is that you make your apartment look like your great-grandma's. And we have talked about art, that super-fancy, expensive art has, for more than a century, often moved away from the traditionally decorative. When billionaires want to show that they are good at art, that they have an artistic aesthetic, they might pick some ugly-ass shit. Damien Hirst, for instance, made The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which consists of a preserved shark displayed in a tank. That is not conventionally beautiful, looking at a dead shark, but it became a highly valuable contemporary artwork.

So it is the same thing with decor, that you can fuck yourself by picking something beautiful because snooty people will look down their noses at it.

Jacobsen: So we have this kind of old-timey Eastern European design, but it is a newer apartment. The wallpaper on top of the original plan is very old-timey, and everything is very thick, tasselly, and ornate. The closest equivalent in Western European aesthetic styles would be something like an auburn-tan, fucking mahogany kind of Baroque style. It looks like, if you look at an old Kevin Smith movie like Clerks, it is very static and visually stark, but then you add a haze over the lens. It is like you did that with everything here, and you can kind of tell. That is what I am getting at. So you have this weird kind of aesthetic, and then randomly you just have a huge fucking television that no one uses.

Rosner: Right. If I turn it around, we have a huge television that I use just to put stuff on top of. It is from 1988. It is an RCA television, and it would work.

Jacobsen: This one is really thin. It is one of those things where you are like, should you just get a bigger television or a projector? It is kind of that level.

Rosner: This is a TV from the 80s. It works. It works pretty well, but it's not hooked up because we would be paying for a converter box, and it is not worth it. But yeah, I know that aesthetic. In fact, that is what they call it. They call it "brown furniture."

Jacobsen: What does that mean?

Rosner: It refers to traditional dark-wood furniture, often made from woods such as mahogany, walnut, or cherry. If you look at Antiques Roadshow episodes from around 2007, you can see how much more highly some of that traditional furniture was valued then. After the financial crisis, prices for many categories of antiques declined, while changing tastes and demographics also reduced demand for traditional furniture.

Because Antiques Roadshow values things that people bring in, they sometimes rerun older episodes and add updated valuations. So you might see an older episode where they say that this 1850s cabinet or chest of drawers was worth X amount, and then they give the updated value, and sometimes it is worth substantially less than it was at the time of the original appraisal.

That applies particularly to some brown furniture because we are talking about rich hardwoods, mahogany, cherry wood, stuff that would grace your grandparents' place. Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z often have less space for this shit, and many do not like the aesthetic. So a lot of that stuff has lost a lot of market value. Some pieces can be worth less than the cost and trouble of moving them, which is weird for somebody my age who's been trained on how expensive that shit is, only to have it suddenly have very little resale value. It does not make sense to me. I mean, it makes sense, but there is cognitive dissonance there.

And we have quite a bit of it. We have inherited a bunch of brown furniture. Now, some of the mid-century modern stuff from the 1950s is still collectible and can be worth something. You have the old-fashioned-looking stuff, and then you have the Atomic Age-looking stuff, which has a bunch of swoopy curves, like on the covers of science-fiction paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. The swoopy stuff, the sleek shit that does not have all the Baroque curlicues, that stuff can still be worth something.

But anyway, it is a battle of aesthetics, which, when you get into these battles, quality will often lose to more hip, recent conceptions of what is prestigious or good.

Jacobsen: The good part of this autumn-spectrum colouring is that it is easy on the eyes. It is like nature green. It is quite nice for me. When I bought my glasses, they were the most expensive of everything they had. They were incredibly expensive. I bought two pairs, one for working on the farm and one for working in the office. And I am in the war zone, so I think these are for the office. I forget.

They transition strongly and very sensitively, so I don't always need sunglasses because they respond to the light. I really notice how it feels on my eyes. It is a completely different colour scheme, but it feels like going into a Pacific Northwest forest, and it is really quite nice. Not even in the fall, like a Pacific Northwest forest in any season.

It is easy on the eyes. This feels like it is easy on the eyes, but there are so many cracks and curves in all the goddamn furniture and stuff that dust can just sit there. So I will clean this up for the tech story. We bought an air purifier, and it is much better because everyone who was living here would come up with random allergy symptoms. Now we have an air purifier that circulates the air through filters and removes airborne particles. I talked them into buying one.

I said, "Let's try it out," and we have had no seasonal allergy complaints since. I have not said a thing because you are not allowed to take credit. But one thing that can be high if you leave it off is the PM2.5. The PM1.0 is generally okay. It is a very capacious apartment.

Rosner: Looks like a really freaking nice space.

Jacobsen: When they talk about Vancouver, it is very close by. I am told repeatedly that where I live is extremely dangerous in Kyiv because of nearby high-profile targets and stuff. Regardless, people tend to let me live with them, and then I do my intellectual work and return the favour because I was a janitor, right? So I dealt with alcoholics' shit in a pub and in a bistro seven days a week for about half a year or so. That was while I was doing all my other restaurant jobs. Then I went to a farm and shovelled horse shit, and I even drove a tractor.

When I was a teenager, I was not very good, but I worked at a truss factory and in construction. So I am used to these jobs, and I use these skills now.

Rosner: Really? A truss factory? Sounds...

Jacobsen: That was one of my opening jobs. Yeah. One of my jobs was to sweep the warehouse. The fucking place was huge.

Rosner: Me too. I had that terrible job. I was the only person who did not speak Spanish at this warehouse. I was useless. 

Jacobsen: I remember the line from the Errol Morris interview. He said, "I also had another job of being the only person who didn't speak Spanish at a cabinet factory." I remember that one. But my whole job was essentially helping with whatever they needed, sweeping the yard because shit just falls all over the place, and collecting all the banding. The banding, for those who are reading this, is strapping wrapped around large bundles of lumber, typically things like four-by-fours and two-by-fours.

Maybe two-by-six, but two-by-four and four-by-four are among the most common. So they drop all the stuff off, and there used to be metal banding, black steel banding. Now plastic strapping is also common, and I guess that is cheaper and easier to cut through. But they would leave all this metal banding around, and there was no time, so people could get cut. And so they would send the newbie kid. I must have been 15, I guess. I had just gotten out of being kicked out of the house for two or three months or whatever. Then I came back, and I was doing this, taking all that banding and throwing it into a box and stuff.

And so, all these kinds of little odds-and-ends jobs, you make sure you use those skills later because that is what they are for, right? You give them to young people for a reason, and then you use them later for a reason. Important skills. And so when I live with people now, when I am doing my journalistic, intellectual, board-member, and legal work, and whatever else I have to be doing, I say, "Okay, I will scrub your toilets. I will clean your bathroom. I will do your dishes. I will clean your counters. I will do your laundry. I will make your beds. I will vacuum if necessary." And the place is spotless constantly because I know what I am doing.

And so I make your life better. And then here I am like, "Well, okay, let's fucking get an air purifier. Let's just see," which means I have already diagnosed the goddamn problem. I used to have them on the farm, and in my farm apartment I had Coway air purifiers. They are very quiet. They use good particulate filtration. Coway is a South Korean company. I had three or four of them in this two-bedroom apartment.

The rule was that I wasn't allowed to have people over, and I wasn't allowed to date anyone unless they were a staff member. All the staff members were women, so I made sure of that. It was a time when I had to be very discreet. But I learned that air purifiers are very useful because of the barn apartment, depending on the season, too.

Rosner: Oh, there is another reason to have an air purifier in Kyiv. You have got one there, right? Because shit gets blown up, and you don't always know what is in the fucking air. If an older apartment building gets hit, for instance, there can be smoke, fine particulate matter, and potentially hazardous building materials in the debris.

Jacobsen: Rick, Rick, Rick.

Rosner: Yeah?

Jacobsen: If a bomb lands nearby and blows up an apartment and starts a fire and there is shit in the air...

Rosner: Let me finish my point.

Jacobsen: Okay. You have a much bigger problem, and the people around you who need your help have a much bigger problem than, "The PM2.5 is really high. That is unusual. Why is it at 100?"

Rosner: All right, all right. So I am being ridiculous, but not entirely ridiculous.

Richard “Rick” Rosner (born May 2, 1960) is an American television writer, producer, game-show writer, media personality, and high-range intelligence-test participant. His credits include Remote Control, The World’s Funniest!, Twenty-One, The Weakest Link, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Grammy Awards, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote more than 1,000 credited episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, won a 2012 Writers Guild Award as part of the After the Academy Awards writing team, received multiple Writers Guild nominations, and earned a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Rosner achieved the only known perfect score on Ronald K. Hoeflin’s Titan Test, ranked among the leading scorers on the Omni Mega Test, and served six years as editor of Noesis, the Mega Society journal. He earned approximately twelve years of college credit within one year and completing requirements equivalent to eight academic majors. In 2013, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year - America.” Rosner appeared on Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was profiled by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in First Person: One in a Million Trillion, and has spent decades developing ideas in cosmology, intelligence, science, technology, television, and culture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.