Comment by 3eb7988a1663
1 day ago
Ehh, I find it difficult to distinguish between "taste" and "money". The shelving alone is a "contact us for pricing" situation. Premium items coupled with a too-clean-to-be-used work environment and natural light can do a significant lift in the "taste" department.
It reminds me a little of set dressing in movies. Every sophisticated character owns a chemex, but they use a french press to make coffee onscreen. Harks back to the days of Notting Hill when we had to believe that Hugh Grant ran a failing second hand bookstore while living in a well-decorated house in central London. Do we think the author uses his Teenage Engineering pocket operators, or are they window dressing? Do we need Godel, Escher and Bach as the backdrop for a completely unrelated photo?
I have GEB, TAoCP, Stevens, Crandall/Pomerance, Tannenbaum, Aho/Sethi/Ullman, Schneier, K&R and a bunch of other books on my shelves next to me. About 1000mm worth in total but I could probably trim it down to about 600mm if I stripped out the random extras related to old projects (Rails/JavaScript/Mysql/etc) or stuff you just don't need a book about (Git).
Putting them anywhere else in the house would either be more "showoff" or just less practical. It's true that I rarely ever pick them up but the few times I do I'm glad they're right next to my work desk.
People can be multi-dimensional. I’m a sysadmin/developer, yet I played in a symphony orchestra, and still play bass, take photos and read world classics, sci-fi and occasional philosophical books.
Why can’t he make music, read music history or biographies, or do other things?
Do all “software engineers” need to interface with a computer 7/24, Matrix style?
Of course you can, I think the author has taste, is clearly interested in design and I enjoyed looking through the images to see what I recognized. I should say that it obviously looks good, for the same reasons that movie sets look good and why we hire set designers/dressers.
It's also fair game to critique these photos from an artistic perspective. Some are clearly intentionally staged and I argue that the messaging is a little clumsy. Sure, it's hard to avoid if you've filled your space with expensive design objects. Another comparison is cooking blogs where the photographers add visual clutter that looks good on instagram, but is impractical and unrelated to the food being cooked. The space itself is very nice, though you've got to be absolutely anal about keeping clutter down.
The amount of hate that people give you for having nice things is something that amazed me when I started experiencing it firsthand.
Prices are on the linked page, or in a full price list PDF it links to.
(Though the fetishisation of this shelving seems weird. Maybe as I grew up in the UK, but I associate it with every single public and office building. Every library, every office, every school. It's not what I'd choose for home.)
https://www.vitsoe.com/us/606/components
Vitsœ is now a British company, and their products are made in the UK as well.
It's great when you actually do want the flexibility. Not that you need anything ridiculously expensive, though. In a garage or workshop it's great because you can just put the brackets where you want and store long stuff like wood or pipes etc. But if you're just putting up shelves that you're never going to move it's less appealing. That said, I have used it in my study because I don't care how it looks and it's very strong.
A lot of what you pay for with these systems is them staying the same for decades at a time - a factory outfitted with shelving doesn't want to have to replace it all just because they're reconfiguring a part or adding on.
On the contrary, there's lots of expensive stuff that's horrifyingly terrible taste. There might be some connection, but they're separate
I know a person with a very good taste; his apartment is even emptier and cleaner than this. He's actually good at his job. Some people just find it actually comfortable. I'm not one of them, but these are real people, not posers.
There’s a chasm between them. I have seen people create great things with no money, and people who slaughtered spaces because they don’t have an eye for anything.