A Fly in the Designer Ointment, or Where the Hell Do I Put All This?
The week before last, I wrote about our trip to Milan Design Week where HiFi felt like it had slipped into a different world, a world where it sat really beautifully alongside thoughtfully designed furniture, interesting spaces, and people who probably own fewer cables than most of us, but have far nicer chairs.
I also mentioned that Lin and I are looking at buying a new apartment in Perpignan, and since getting back, my brain has been doing that thing. You know the one. You start off thinking about something fairly straightforward, like where the sofa might go, and before you know it you are mentally rearranging an entire space that does not yet exist, placing artwork on walls you have not properly sat in front of, and, in my case, trying to work out how the hell the HiFi is going to sit in all of this without looking like it has just landed there by accident.
That was all going quite well, actually. I had visions of a system that felt integrated (not hidden, mind), considered, part of the room rather than something that had taken it over. Very Milan Design Week. Very grown up… shock horror. Possibly even… curated. I’ve had an AI thing create images of the room, and it all looks rather splendid in a kind of “alter to the gods of HiFi” kind of way. If it comes off, it will look spectacular. Really spectacular!
And then reality kneed me firmly in the knackers. Because it is all very well thinking about how the HiFi looks (that bit is easy enough), but what about the stuff that feeds it?
I have, at this point, thousands of records. Thousands of CDs. Boxes of things I haven’t played in years, but refuse to get rid of because I might want to get back into Mongolian throat singing metal at some point. Or I might want to play Lin’s collection of acetate discs that came with Kerrang. Or my copy of Hole in My Shoe by Neil off the Young Ones.
And suddenly the question is not “where does the HiFi go?” but “where the actual feck on earth does all of this crap go?”
I have been looking at racks. Proper record storage, nice units, something that looks a bit more designey than the usual approach. And there are some really good options out there. You can get things that look quite sleek, quite architectural even. Things with drawers that hide the discs. But the problem is not one rack. It is ten racks. Twenty. Rows and rows of them. A room full of them. And at this point, no matter how nicely designed the individual unit is, you are basically building a library. Which is great, if that’s the look you are going for. Less great if you are trying to keep things feeling open, calm, and a bit stylish. There is a point where “impressive collection” becomes “this is a lot of stuff”.
Do I split it all up? Have the main system in the listening and living space, keep it clean, keep it focused, and move the bulk of the collection somewhere else. Another room. A dedicated storage space. Almost like my own little archive. And I have to say, this idea does appeal, particularly in the apartment that we’ve singled out as “the one”. I could have a small selection of records out. Rotate them. It is a very design-led way of thinking about it all. Quite Milan Design Week. Only have out what needs to be out.
But then I start thinking about how I actually use my music. Because I do DJ quite a bit at home, and I like the freedom of being able to reach for something unexpected. To be in the middle of a mix, have a thought, and go and find that record that I’ve not played in years, because suddenly it feels exactly right. And that relies on access to all my tunes, not just those that have made it into this week’s selection box. This freedom relies on being able to scan shelves, pull things out, change my mind, put something back, and grab something else. If everything is tucked away in another room and I have a neat little box of “current selections” next to me, that spontaneity (to a degree) goes. It becomes more controlled, more limited, and I do the whole DJing thing to allow myself to get lost…I say it’s my form of meditation. And I am not sure I want that freedom hindered.
So then I started going round in circles. Do I prioritise how it looks, or how it works? Can I have both?
Maybe the answer is to accept that if I have a large physical collection, then that is part of the aesthetic. Not something to hide, but something to embrace and show off to the world – or those folk who get through the front door. A wall of records can look fantastic, to be fair. There is something quite comforting and nostalgic about it. It tells a story. It says something about the person who lives there. It has texture, colour, and history. But again, there is a balance. A carefully arranged wall is one thing. Floor-to-ceiling chaos is another. I used to love having my records on the shelves that once made up the back of the bar in our listening room – the house was once a restaurant. I had it all nicely lit and everything. It looked really cool, to be fair. But then I decided to take the shelves out to create more space, and that space was soon filled up with IKEA units to house the records. You can’t win!
Then there is the nuclear option. Go all in on streaming. Go fully digital. Rip everything. Store it on a server. Access it all from a screen. No physical clutter, no storage issues, no shelves bending under the weight of my questionable purchasing decisions from forty years ago. From a purely practical point of view, this solves everything. But it also removes something really important to me. That physicality I keep banging on about. The act of choosing something, holding it, and placing it on a turntable or in a tray. And it’s doable on the DJing front, too. Have everything on a hard drive and buy a set of CDJs. However, I have tried this route, and it was wholly unsatisfactory from a meditative point of view. I know I am not alone in that. There is something about owning and playing music physically that feels different.
So that doesn’t feel like the answer either, at least not entirely.
Maybe there is a hybrid approach. Some physical, some digital. A core collection that lives with me, the rest archived or ripped and accessible when needed. This feels like a compromise, and I am not sure what I’m compromising for. To be fair, this is kind of going on here already to an extent.
But why am I even considering this? A neater room? A cleaner look? A room that will look nice in Wallpaper magazine? This is where it gets amusing, because last week I was talking about how HiFi could be presented in a more design-conscious way, how it could sit comfortably in modern spaces and appeal to people who might not see themselves as audiophiles.
And all of that still stands.
But what I had not really considered, or at least not fully, is that HiFi is not just the equipment. It is the ecosystem around it. The records, the CDs, the boxes of things you can’t part with. The stuff that accumulates over years and years. Records with history. CDs that possibly still have traces of illicit substances on their plastic cases. Memories, I guess.
You can design the perfect system, place it beautifully in a room, pair it with the right furniture, get the lighting just so… and then you have to deal with the reality of owning a lot of music. Which is, in itself, not a bad problem to have.
Design tends to lean towards control. Clean lines, considered placement, intentional choices. Music collecting, especially over a long period of time, leans towards chaos. Accumulation, impulse, nostalgia, things bought on a whim that you keep because they remind you of a time or a place. Things that you buy because you don’t have it, only to get it home and realise you’ve already bought three copies of the same album…and none of them has been out of the wrapper.
Trying to get design and collecting records and CDs to sit comfortably together is… tricky.
I don’t have an answer yet. I suspect I will end up somewhere in the middle, as most people do. A bit of this, a bit of that. A solution that makes sense to me, but would probably horrify a proper interior designer.
But it has made me think. Not just about how HiFi looks, but about everything that comes with it.
Maybe the real challenge here might not be making HiFi look better. Maybe it is making a life with music, in all its physical, slightly messy glory, fit into a space that still feels like a home. And if anyone has cracked that without it looking like either a design showroom or a second-hand record shop, I would genuinely love to know how.
Stu
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