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Goopy Little Mushroom Lamps—and More Cosmic Objects From FOG Design + Art Fair 2026

A rich walnut table with plug-and-play totems and a tiny precious blue horse added to a spiritual shift at this year’s event at Fort Mason.

This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.

One of the West Coast’s best art and design fairs is hitting a growth spurt in its teenage years: San Francisco’s FOG Design + Art fair is established enough to assert its identity, but still young enough for boisterous experimentation. The 12th edition of the event saw strong showings from established international galleries making encore appearances, but there were also several first-time FOG exhibitors, many of them showing up-and-coming artists from the Bay Area and beyond.

Taking place across two piers at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, FOG also always has familiar faces—and, surprisingly, some new-to-me Bay Area mainstays that I’m delighted to discover. This year it was Crown Point Press and William Stout Books. But I also love finding out about international artists working in mediums like glassblowing, woodcarving, ceramics, weaving, and more. The real magic of FOG is seeing art displayed alongside design, revealing the beauty of craft in all its forms.

Photographer Cayce Clifford and I teamed up again this year to peruse FOG’s opening party in search of the fair’s most off-the-wall showings from near and far. Winding our way through the booths, it was easy to lose track of time as we enjoyed the simple pleasure of leaning in. Here’s an up close look at what we found.

San Francisco locals William Stout Architectural Books had its converted VW parked outside the fair.

Marta Gallery

Now in its third year, FOG FOCUS, the fair’s platform for emerging artists, had its biggest showing yet with 16 galleries. Located in its own pier at Fort Mason, the exhibition is always buzzing with experimentation. A newcomer to this year’s fair, Los Angeles’s Marta Gallery had one of our favorite FOCUS booths, dedicated to a tandem showing of work by New York–based designer Minjae Kim and photographer and sculptor Dominik Tarabański.

"We wanted to participate in FOG because it’s one of the only fairs that, without arbitrary boundaries or categorizations, places art and design on the same plane," Marta’s cofounder Benjamin Critton told us. The gallery’s booth did just that, with lighting and furniture by Kim sitting alongside photographs by Tarabański, the two in intimate dialogue. Kim and Tarabański are friends and have studios in the same building in Brooklyn, so a joint showing was a natural way to continue their artistic conversation.

With designer Minjae Kim working in quilted fiberglass and carved wood, and photographer Dominik Tarabański crafting fragile sculptures and flower arrangements that he photographs, both artists deal in the language of ephemerality, toggling between the realms of the precious and the disposable. Marta’s booth was a powerful reminder of the beauty found in this tension.

Blunk Space

A Bay Area treasure, Blunk Space is a Point Reyes gallery and research center dedicated to the legacy of local designer JB Blunk. Founded by Blunk’s daughter, Mariah Nielson, the gallery first made an appearance at FOG last year in the fair’s retail section, FOG MRKT. This year, Blunk Space had its own booth at FOCUS, with a group show of contemporary furniture by Rio Kobayashi alongside historic paintings by a trio of Blunk’s artist friends. Also on view were a selection of tabletop sculptures by current artists that are part of the gallery’s "100 Candleholders" exhibition, now on view.

Seeing Kobayashi’s blocky chairs and stools next to abstract paintings by Richard Bowman, Fritz Rauh, and John Anderson made them feel even more sculptural, lifting them out of the functional realm into the world of artistry.

See the full story on Dwell.com: Goopy Little Mushroom Lamps—and More Cosmic Objects From FOG Design + Art Fair 2026
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Yes, a Public Restroom Just Won a Design Award—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

Kanye West’s Malibu mansion lawsuit could go to trial, students and faculty at Brown University fight to save its architecture program, and more.

New York’s 2026 AIA design awards put a spotlight on both high profile projects like Lincoln Center’s revamp, and smaller ones like a tiny modular public bathroom on Staten Island, marking a move away from flashy "starchitecture" toward design that serves everyday city life. Here’s what makes the bathroom worthy of the accolade. (Gothamist)
America’s housing crisis is about more than a shortage of homes—it’s also about the "soul-deadening" sprawl that’s expands over swaths of the country. Here’s how combatting an epidemic of ugly homes might simultaneously ease the affordability crisis. (Vox)
A Los Angeles judge has cleared the way for a construction consultant’s lawsuit against Kanye West to go to trial, after claims that Ye put him in "extreme danger" while gutting the $57 million Tadao Ando–designed Malibu mansion he bought in 2021. Here’s what the lawsuit alleges, and how the mansion’s new owner plans to restore the place. (Rolling Stone)
Tokyo’s small scale, pedestrian-friendly streets are being overtaken by luxury developments and "tower mansions," leading Pritzker Prize winning architect Riken Yamamoto to warn that the city is becoming a playground for the rich. Here’s why Yamamoto says these massive projects are "destroying the heart" of the Tokyo. (Bloomberg)

A view of University Hall on the campus of Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island on December 14, 2025. — Students and faculty at Brown University are fighting to keep its undergraduate architecture program intact.

Photo by Bing Guan / AFP via Getty Images

Brown University is moving to discontinue its undergraduate architecture concentration by 2028, sparking backlash from students and faculty who say the program’s interdisciplinary approach embodies Brown’s mission. The professor who cofounded the program says that Brown could become the only Ivy League school without an undergraduate architecture major should the shut down go forward. (The Architect's Newspaper)

Top photo by Ty Cole

"Are You Dead?": The Viral Check-In App Highlighting a Very Modern Anxiety

The Chinese mobile software helps you keep tabs on loved ones who live alone. To me, its popularity isn’t surprising.

When the third text went through as SMS, I assumed my mom was dead. It was a major jump to conclusions, sure, but hear me out: She lives alone, on the other side of the country from both of her children and her siblings, and for the past few years she’s had an unrelenting series of health scare whack-a-moles, some of which we’ve been able to fly out to support with, and others we haven’t. I’ve tried to develop a habit of checking in more regularly than I used to. If a handful of days go by and I don’t have an unread text or Instagram DM with a Reel from her very specific corner of the internet, I’ll send her a quick "How are you?" or a clip from the least questionable depths of my algorithm. It’s not that my motivations for corresponding with my mother are disingenuous (how dare you!), but I’d be lying if I said that I also haven’t come to see these passive connective gestures as steady proof of life.

So a few months ago, when that text showed up as a green bubble, and I counted the days since I’d heard from her, my mind immediately skipped past many points of reason. I called my sister; they also hadn’t talked in a few days, which to her was curious, but not immediately concerning. My nervous system, however, was firing. This is it, I thought. How the @)!*#* can I check? I’m six hours away—by plane. I don’t have any of her friends’ phone numbers.

I’ll speed through the part where I called her workplace (it was the receptionist’s first day; she didn’t know if my mom had come in recently) and eventually semifrantically asked a family member on my dad’s side (my parents are divorced) who lives in the area to rush over and do a wellness check. After about 15 minutes of sitting around and letting the worst-case scenario crystallize in my head, the phone rang. Turns out, she just had a really bad case of the flu, and her phone had died without her realizing it.

Your image of me based on that story might be that I’m someone who’s quicker to assume crisis than the average person, and there might be some truth in that—I’ll admit, my sensitivity around my parents’ mortality has intensified in the last few years, since my dad also had a major health event in that period. But I feel pretty strongly that my cortisol levels wouldn’t have spiked as immediately in response to a few days of unanswered texts from my mother if not for another experience that further shook up what used to be my more default state of "everything is probably fine": that worst-case scenario actually did play out for someone I loved who lived alone, who was discovered after a family member decided they’d sent a few too many texts without responses. So in early January, when I first read about China’s viral "Are You Dead?" app in a BBC story shared by trend researcher Casey Lewis in her Substack After School, I laughed to myself about the app’s fearless branding, but also…I got it.

The app, which changed its name from "Si le ma," or "Are You Dead Yet" in English, to "Demumu" quickly after it drew international media attention, was created by three Gen Z developers as an "invisible safety net for those who live independently, without invasive tracking," according to its website. (One of the developers told Wired that the new name is a combination of the word "death" and the naming pattern of Labubu, the Chinese plushie toy that caused its own global consumer craze.) Though it reportedly launched in mid-2025, it only recently became the most downloaded paid app in China for a period, and subsequently climbed the rankings in overseas App Store charts. By the third week of January, it held the 10th spot in the paid Utilities apps section of Apple’s U.S. App Store (though by the time of publishing, it no longer ranked in that section’s top 200).

Using "Are You Dead? | Demumu, Official Genuine Version," as it currently appears in the U.S. App Store (suggesting it might’ve already inspired similar apps), is simple by design. At set up, you’re asked to enter an emergency contact name and email. A big green button with a small ghost icon in its center asks the user to "Check in today." After one tap, it goes gray with the note "Check-in successful." If a user fails to "check in" for two consecutive days, it automatically sends an email to the designated contact, urging them to check on the user in person. (The App Store page says the recently relaunched version of the app added check-in reminders to its functions.) The interface is straightforward enough for any person who’s interacted with a smartphone to operate, so the barrier to entry is as low as it probably could be for less tech-savvy, older generations—the expected demographic for a "tool" of this nature—to use. But it also struck a chord with young people. One of the cofounders of Moonscape Technologies, the app’s parent company, said he thinks the app gained its first traffic boost when it was picked up by an influencer on the popular Chinese social platform RedNote.

A blog post on the app’s website titled "Why Daily Check-ins Matter for People Living Alone" reads: "Living alone offers independence and freedom, but it also comes with unique safety considerations. For millions of people worldwide, a simple question haunts them: What if something happens and no one knows?" above a section that describes the Japanese term kodokushi, or "lonely death," for when people die alone and remain undiscovered for extended periods. The app’s sudden viral moment might boil down in part to the shock value of its original name; it’s not the first-ever digital check-in tool (in the U.S., for example, the Snug Safety app launched more than a few years ago). But its quick and wide embrace among younger users reflects a modern anxiety across generations about how we check on others—and get checked in with, too—when more people are living and spending significant time alone.

As noted in a November 2025 Economist story titled "The Rise of Singlehood Is Reshaping the World," the share of people living alone has increased in 26 out of 30 wealthy countries since 2010. In China, there may be up to 200 million one-person households by 2030, according to information from research institutions reported by state media. In the U.S. alone, over a quarter of all occupied households had just one resident in 2020, up from 7.7 percent in 1940, per Census data. Meanwhile, data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey for 2025 shows that the number of one-person households in the U.S. is nearing a record 40 million. More American baby boomers and Gen Xers are living by themselves than ever before, opting to age in place (as in, live independently at home for as long as possible rather than relocating to an institutional setting), and people over 50 are more likely than earlier generations to be divorced, separated, or never married. Millennials and Gen Zers are increasingly delaying or forgoing getting married and having children. But the housing market hasn’t necessarily caught up with those shifts. In a recent essay, Dwell managing editor Jack Balderrama Morley wrote about how he’s starting to think ahead for his later-in-life housing as a "solo ager," a newer term for people who are getting older and living alone without kids or a spouse. "You’d be right in thinking that I’m a little young to be taking on this mantle now, but I’m planning ahead for architectural reasons…. The questions that solo agers have to face force us to reconsider the world: How do I want to live? Who is taking care of me? How do we take care of each other?" he asks in his piece.

Add to the equation the ways the pandemic restructured our individual and communal lives. Remote work allowed large swaths of people to relocate. Many young Americans left more populated urban cores for smaller cities and towns in search of more affordable lifestyles. When your home is your office, and vice versa, that also translates to much less time spent in proximity to other people—less passing neighbors on your commute and socializing in person with coworkers. Studies have shown that young people today spend more time at home, and are more generally socially isolated, than previous generations. That trend has been rising since before the Great Structural Shake Up of 2020. We also have something else to thank: the arrival of technology that lets people engage as much, if not more, online than in the actual world around them.

As much as the surveillance state is critiqued, and for important reasons, technology can be a godsend for communication when distance of any kind is a factor (or even if it’s not; Find My Friends can be a great way to realize someone is near you and coordinate a hang out that might not have happened). It has also allowed people to live in greater physical isolation and reshaped our notions of what constitutes legitimate social connection, not to mention raised fundamental tensions around how we set boundaries, both with others and our digital devices. An app like Demumu could help address an increasing and genuine need to keep tabs on the safety of those who live solo, and it’s a less intense step than using a full-blown medical alert system. (Though, interestingly, the global market for those is projected to more than double by 2035.)

For now, I think I’ll stick to semiregular texts for check-ins, even if it means an occasional false alarm. As it turns out, my family member’s favor to me ended up paying it forward: A few weeks later, she decided to drive to her elderly mother’s house when she couldn’t get a hold of her, channeling some of my residual nervousness. Her mother had fallen, and the surprise drop-by saved her life.

Top photo by dowel via Getty Images.

‘I Will Die Here’: A Conversation With My Mom About Her East Village Apartment of 27 Years

This Netherlands Home Nods to a "Langgevelboerderij"—or a Traditional Farmhouse

The elongated plan mirrors a vernacular once typical of Weert, but is freshly expressed with materials like fraké wood and clay blocks.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Weert, The Netherlands

Architect: De Nieuwe Context / @denieuwecontext

Footprint: 2,960 square feet

Builder: HSBB

Structural Engineer: BDA Engineering

Landscaping: Makers Landscape

Masonry: Rennenberg Bouw

Photographer: Riccardo de Vecchi /@riccardodevecchi.photo

From the Architect: "In the rural green surroundings of Weert, this new residence sits on a plot with unobstructed views over the farmlands. The landscape forms the foundation of the design, which harmonizes with its environment and the wishes of the residents. Together, form, material, and spatial layout create a sense of unity with the surrounding countryside.

"The design draws inspiration from the traditional langgevelboerderij (long-facade farmhouse), a building type historically common in the Weert region. As the name suggests, this farmhouse is characterized by its elongated shape and the combination of living and working spaces along a horizontal axis. This idea is reflected both in the house’s vertical layering and in the horizontal organization of its interior spaces. The layout fosters a strong connection with the landscape. Expansive rear windows open the house to its surroundings, creating a sense of freedom and bringing the outdoors in. Sunken seating areas enhance the feeling of calm and spaciousness, strengthening the connection with nature throughout the open interior.

"The building is constructed from natural and sustainable materials, chosen not only for their warm appearance but also for their environmental benefits. The exterior is clad in sustainable fraké wood, while clay blocks from the Spanish company Fetdeterra are used in both the facade and interior. The texture and color of these bricks ensure a natural integration into the environment. Moreover, clay blocks are a circular building material that can significantly reduce the construction industry’s material footprint and CO₂ emissions."

See the full story on Dwell.com: This Netherlands Home Nods to a "Langgevelboerderij"—or a Traditional Farmhouse
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Can we Blame the Banks for the Dearth of American Starter Homes?

The popular narrative for why there’s an insufficient supply of houses for first-time buyers centers on new construction, but small dollar mortgage policy is a big barrier worth further critique.

Like a face on the housing milk carton, we’re all wondering where the starter homes have gone. These elusive properties—affordable to those starting out in their careers who need fewer bells and whistles but hope to enter the real estate market—seemed, per recent media coverage, to have disappeared. This month the Washington Post dove into the issue by looking at new construction trends. The New York Times asked similar questions in 2022; NPR did, too, in 2025. Of course, most focus on new construction, where there are many issues at play, like consumer demand, fluctuating material costs, land prices, zoning rules, and more.

America’s housing supply crisis is widely framed as a challenge of new supply, and the solution put forward is to build more homes faster. But this crisis is also a financing problem: In cities across the country, there is already a stock of starter homes—they’re older, and as the Post story notes, many are "on the smaller side, in need of renovation, or both." In decades past, these older houses have served as a gateway to building wealth, keeping pace of even average household incomes. Today, the problem isn’t relegated only to why we’re not building them, but who is deemed worthy to own an existing one in the first place.

Since the Great Recession, new banking regulations have made it far more difficult for working people to finance homes under $200,000—otherwise known loosely as small dollar mortgages. These loans have served an outsized role in ensuring that working-class families can buy a house and begin the long road of building wealth. Though we might like to discuss the possibility of new developments meeting this need, fantasizing over the technologies and construction methods that might one day build a home that a teacher or nurse could afford, the disappearance of small dollar loans has, in the meantime, locked out a swath of homebuyers. Though financing is decidedly less sexy than the aforementioned fantasy of a land of plentiful attainable homes, it forces the question as to what a contemporary starter home might mean in the context of today’s rising construction costs and bloated home sizes.

While residents of major American cities might imagine that inexpensive single family homes are located only in rural areas, data from research and policy think tank New America shows that they exist in every county across the US, especially in mid-size cities: One in five owner-occupied homes across the country are valued at less than $150,000; around a quarter are valued at less than $200,000. Being able to afford a home on a working-class salary or two moderate incomes sounds like a dream, but after the 2009 Dodd-Frank Act that posed new regulations on mortgage lenders was enacted, the loans to help families finance these older houses have mostly disappeared.

"Following the 2008 crash, it became unprofitable for banks to write mortgage loans below a certain threshold because the compliance costs and costs of originating loans increased for banks," says Yulyia Panfil, director of the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. The cost of writing and origination for a $150,000 loan to buy a humble 1950s bungalow might be the same as a $500,000 loan for a much larger house, but the profit the bank sees from the large loan is far higher. "So what we have seen over the last 15 years is a significant drop off of banks making these small loans, and the result is that you have all of these families who otherwise would qualify for these homes, but they’re locked out of them because they can’t get the mortgage financing."

To make matters worse (and infinitely more complex), borrowers are now more strictly screened for lending. Research by Kevin Erdmann, a journalist and senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, shows that borrowers with credit scores lower than 760 were regularly approved for mortgages prior to the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2009, that number of approvals dropped by more than half. Some might say this was the right move after popular messaging during this time blamed the county’s housing collapse on lower income buyers who bought nicer homes than they could afford. To put it in perspective, though, 760 is only 60 points higher than the average American credit score. We not only reduced the number of people who might otherwise qualify for a mortgage, but also made it far more difficult for them to buy a house that would actually be in their price range. FHA loans—government-insured mortgages from private lenders, that have historically helped those first time buyers, and those with lower credit or savings— are designed to address these populations, though a report by the Urban Institute shows that denial rates for loans under $100,000 are nearly 10 percentage points higher than all other FHA mortgages.

Some might wonder why homebuyers wouldn’t just purchase a cheap house in cash—turns out, many do. The Pew Research Center reports that, while small-dollar homes accounted for more than a quarter of total sales from 2018 to 2021, only 26 percent of properties that sold for less than $150,000 were financed using a mortgage, compared with 71 percent of higher-cost homes. But those homebuyers overwhelmingly aren’t first-time homeowners; the decline in small-dollar mortgages has instead created opportunities for investors to gulp up the market.

In 2020, nearly 79 percent of homes selling for more than $100,000 were purchased by owner-occupants, according to the Urban Institute report; though 13 percent of all homes sold went for less than $100,000, only half of these were purchased by owner-occupants. Erdmann has been ringing this bell for more than five years: He has examined real estate dynamics to demonstrate how dramatic shifts in mortgage access have impacted the investor market. In Atlanta, he writes, the 2008 recession hit poorer neighborhoods (where more residents rely on access to credit) harder, and home values dropped precipitously.

The result, says Panfil, was the rise in corporate landlords. "A large portion of the purchases are by larger investors who are either holding those homes off the market as a speculative asset, or they’re turning those homes into rental properties," she says. Homes that were once occupied by longtime owners then begin to decay under corporate stewardship. "Often with the homes being owned by out of state landlords, anecdotally, we hear complaints that they’re not as responsive in fixing up the homes and maintaining them," she continues.

Even if a private homeowner were to find a lender to buy one of the many cheaper houses on the market, the home may not even appraise after years of investor neglect. As the Post hints, the quintessential starter home likely needs work, and while fixing up an old home sounds romantic, many of these houses might require major repairs to pass inspection, says Panfil. Repair loans are also hard to come by; Ben DeBoer, a mortgage broker and founder of Reside Home Loans, describes renovation loans—which help to acquire the property and renovate that property up to livable standards—as more "complicated and expensive."

"Let’s say it was a $50,000 renovation, and you wanted to use a conventional renovation loan, you better bet on somewhere around $5,000 of extra closing costs above and beyond normal, and an interest rate that’s probably .75 percent higher," he explains. It makes little sense then for an everyday homebuyer to take on the difficult task of renovating a house they might otherwise afford, leaving investors to pick at the carcass of our once-vibrant starter home market and make the minimum repairs.

"What it does incentivize with those cash buyers and corporations is the flip that everybody fears, where they buy it, they put lipstick on it and try to sell it, and you end up not actually adding good value to the neighborhood," DeBoer adds. And those bad-faith flips can have much broader impacts. "Since lower tier homes have been underpriced, investors have incentives to buy those homes and fix them up so they are nice enough to attract high-end buyers in the market that isn’t underpriced," Erdmann writes, leading to an inevitable wave of displacement. It’s hit communities of color especially hard, says Panfil. The country’s pervasive and widening racial wealth gap has ensured that many would-be homeowners fall into this small dollar price range.

It’s an unintended consequence of regulations that were designed to prevent another Great Recession. Perhaps when lawmakers envisioned these restrictions, they never imagined the supply crunch we have now, or believed that wages would rise alongside housing costs, allowing working families to afford newer homes. The question isn’t where the starter homes have gone—the starter homes of the past are still the starter homes of today. The difference is that the teacher or nurse, the working people who once had the doors of homeownership opened to them have seen those same doors slammed shut. Panfil emphasizes that there are reasons to be optimistic, however, as solutions abound. Regulatory fixes, ways to streamline processes to reduce mortgage origination costs, developing new products that reduce barriers to renovation, and more. Building more homes will certainly secure the starter homes of the future, she says, but "we can unlock existing starter homes for people all over the country today."

Top photo by Douglas Keister via Getty Images.

Is the Door Closing on First-Generation Homebuyers?

Every L.A. Renter Has a Weird Fridge Story. Here Are Just a Few

Now that a new law finally requires landlords to source units, renters in the city reflect on what they went through just to keep their food fresh.

What’s the most cumbersome object you’ve ever had to schlep in a move? For me, it’s probably a sectional or a mattress. Once in college, I moved a futon by myself, and, failing to lash it properly to the bed of my 1985 El Camino, the cushion took flight on the freeway, very luckily coming to a soft landing on the shoulder. (It did eventually make it into my house, somehow unscathed, and without harming a soul.)

Thankfully I’ve never had the pleasure of heaving a refrigerator or stove, though, and, if you live in the U.S. and rent, chances are you haven’t, either. But for Los Angeleno renters, moving a fridge from place to place, not to mention sourcing, maintaining, or installing one, has been their responsibility—an odd rite of passage in the city, like the brokerage fee was to New York. Some know all too well the song and dance of the secondhand "fridge economy": scouring Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for a unit, or hitting up a Taskrabbit for a repair. Others have had to pass up that dream apartment—the perfect spot, except critically there wasn’t space for a fridge at all. And then there are times when you buy a used unit and, to your surprise, get to clean out someone else’s mess.

But these odd rituals and runarounds that belong to Los Angeles will soon be a thing of the past, now that a new 2026 law requires the city’s landlords to provide renters with refrigerators. And as anyone who’s rented there might tell you, good riddance. Here, six Los Angelenos reminisce about the time (or two) when they had the privilege of figuring out a fridge.

Does a Used Fridge Really Ever Feel Clean?

My boyfriend, Jeremy, and I were living in North Carolina but were looking to move to Los Angeles. He went ahead of me and started touring apartments and sending me videos, and when I watched one for the apartment we currently live in, I noticed there was no dishwasher. We hemmed and hawed about whether that was a dealbreaker, but decided to sign the lease, and a month later, I moved out there with all my belongings packed in a U-Haul.

When we got to the apartment, we did a walkthrough, and they had us sign a checklist of amenities. We were standing in the kitchen filling it out, but it wasn’t until we got to a bullet point about a refrigerator did we see that it said "n/a," and realized there was no fridge—we literally whipped our heads around to find a blank space where a unit should have been. It was obviously too late to change anything, though, so we signed the checklist and went to Facebook Marketplace for a used fridge.

We found one in Hollywood, and my hubris (and empty wallet from having already rented a U-Haul to drive across the country) made me believe that I could fit the fridge into my SUV. We bought a furniture dolly and got the refrigerator out of this guy’s apartment, and when we tipped it backwards into my car, gelatinous old wine goo started to dump out of the bottom spill tray. We just barely got my SUV closed with a bungee cord, and hauled the fridge back to the house, where I sat in the driveway and finished cleaning out the goo.

I got the fridge in the house and plugged it in, and thank God, it worked, because I didn’t have the emotional fortitude to get a different fridge. Long story long, I still have the fridge, but I hate it because the door doesn’t always shut all the way, and after cleaning out a full bottle’s worth of red wine goo from its crevices, it never truly feels clean in there. — Amber Mooers, ceramics artist

The Perfect Apartment Exists—But It Might Not Have Space for a Fridge

Unfortunately this law came about a year too late for me. Last year, I found what I thought was my dream apartment—a unit inside a Spanish Revival building blanketed with bougainvillea. It was under my budget and charming, with arched thresholds, built-in alcoves, and a plastered-over fireplace with a tiled base where I imagined placing tall votive candles. All that was missing was a refrigerator and a kitchen big enough to actually put one; the stove and the sink took up essentially all of the space in the tiny galley kitchen.

But I really wanted to make this apartment work. I brainstormed. Maybe my new fridge could go in the sliver of unoccupied space under the cabinet. I imagined buying a mini Frigidaire, making it my entire personality, and then running the cord over the sink (excellent) to reach the only outlet. The fridge would block my access to the sink, but whatever! There are bathroom sinks for a reason, right? But unfortunately, I had briefly dated someone in L.A. who lived that mini-fridge life and I knew it wasn’t for me.

What was my alternative? I imagined broaching the subject with the hypothetical Taskrabbit standing in my future doorway. Here is my adult-person refrigerator. Perhaps we install it in the bedroom between the bookcase and the closet. I showed the listing to the Responsible Adults and handy types in my life for a solution I may have missed. The answer was clear, though: not the right place for me. — Grace Bernard, editorial strategist and Dwell contributor

Congratulations, You’re the Proud New Owner of a Pre-Owned GE

My previous apartment came with a pretty dingy fridge that was used, and didn’t have a lot of space. I was complaining to some friends of mine and they were, like, Oh, we just got a new fridge. Come and take our old one. And so I got that fridge and replaced my small dingy one. But then I bought another one, and I had to essentially have a talk with my landlord to be like, Hey, I’m buying a new fridge, and I’m taking it with me when I leave. It’s funny to even have to negotiate that, you know? Like, I’m either selling the new one I bought to my landlord, or taking it with me. And I’ve hung the new one ever since.

Because of the law before now, there’s been this crazy used fridge market. The unit for my woodshop, I ended up finding a guy on Craigslist who brought it over and set it up for $150. It was a pretty good deal for a boring old GE situation. But if you look at Craigslist, there are absolutely people who make a living selling fridges. Any metropolitan area might have something similar, but it feels especially crazy here.

And then if a refrigerator breaks, that’s all of a sudden very much your responsibility and not the landlord at all. With my last refrigerator, something was leaking and something stopped heating properly or whatever, and I had to find a random person—I don’t know if I went to Thumbtack, or Craigslist, or what. But some random guy came over and was just like, Sure, I can repair it for a minimum of $400, but if you’re gonna spend that, you should just buy a new fridge. — Adam Christgau, furniture designer and drummer

"I had started dating my now-husband, and he had to look up videos on how to fix the freezer. That’s part of our love story, I guess."

—Hannah Go, designer

Assembly Is Definitely Required

My apartment two years ago didn’t have a fridge, so my roommate and I found one on Facebook Marketplace. It didn’t fit into our car, so we had to take the doors off, but it still didn’t fit right. We had to drive at like five miles per hour with the trunk fully open and us clutching the fridge from inside the car, hoping it wouldn’t slide out. When we finally got it to the apartment and got it inside, we attached the doors on the wrong side. So if you were in the kitchen and you tried to open it, it would hit the kitchen counter.

At that point we were so over the whole process of getting that fridge in there that we just left it that way, so for the entire year that we lived in that apartment, you had to do this weird shimmy between the wall and the kitchen counter to get into the fridge. And you could only access the inside through, like, a 45-degree sliver. It was ridiculous. — Sergio Cana

Pay It Back, With Interest

I was living in South L.A., and my roommate and I didn’t have a fridge for our apartment. We were super cheap, so we went on Craigslist and got one from Baldwin Hills with my truck. But we ended up moving to Koreatown a year later, and that place didn’t have a fridge, either. And it was sort of a weird situation leaving the other apartment. We couldn’t really take the fridge with us because now there were other people living there that were going to stay, and it got complicated.

For the new apartment in Koreatown, I just went to Sears to buy a refrigerator. I didn’t like paying cash, so I opened a Sears credit card and bought the cheapest fridge, which I think was probably still like $600, and made monthly payments. I think it was like $60 a month for six years. It was great. [laughs] A total rip—I paid so much interest on that fridge.

What’s interesting about this fridge thing is that there’s a whole used fridge economy, and a fridge mover economy, in Los Angeles that is now going to be totally toast. There are full on car lots for refrigerators, and there are these guys that are like piano movers, but for fridges. — Cesar Maria, songwriter and producer

In Your Twenties, Luxury (and Love) Is a Working Refrigerator

When I first moved to Highland Park, my first apartment that I ever lived in by myself was essentially a studio plus—like a studio with a bonus room. It was a second-floor walk-up in this building that was kind of Brownstone-esque, very East Coast. I had to buy a fridge but did not have the money, because I was so afraid of having to pay the $1,300 a month in rent, which is comical to think back on now. I was like, well, I’m just not gonna have a fridge until I can figure out how to have one. Around that time I went to a casino and gambled for the first time in my life, and ended up winning $200. I used it to buy a refrigerator. And I actually had enough money left over to pay a Taskrabbit to haul it up the stairs with a dolly.

Another time, in my mid-twenties, I got a second-floor apartment near the mouth of Chavez Ravine by Dodger Stadium for a couple of years. I had a roommate and we were really jazzed. It was way nicer than anything we’d lived in before, and there was parking. Considering our means, it was sweet living, but of course, the apartment didn’t have a fridge. We had a small one delivered from a used store down the street at Sunset and Echo Park, and to get it up to the second floor, we used a couple of my skateboards to wheel it up as best we could, pushing and pulling it. It was a beautiful fridge, but it broke down all the time. We had to YouTube how to fix it more than once. The nice thing about old fridges is that none of them have computers or sensors or anything, so there was a lot we could repair ourselves. I had started dating my now-husband at the time, and he had to look up videos on how to fix the freezer. That’s part of our love story, I guess. — Hannah Go, designer

This Is Normal

When my wife and I moved to Glendale from Orange, where we were staying with my parents for a little bit, our new rental apartment didn’t have a refrigerator. I was like, Oh, I’ll just figure it out. I was talking to my cousin about it, which is when I became aware that landlords don’t have to provide refrigerators. He told me he happened to have an extra one lying around at one of his properties in East L.A., but that it was probably moldy since it had been sitting outside. He wasn’t even sure if it was working, but just offered it up to us.

I have a RAV4, and my wife and I and my cousin went to his property to pick up the fridge, and it was a puzzle getting it in. I had to put the back seats down, and slid up the front passenger seat. Luckily it was a smaller unit, and not too heavy. Getting it into our apartment on the third floor was a whole other puzzle, because there was no elevator. We brought a dolly, but it was actually easier to carry it up three flights of stairs.

When we got it to our place, it definitely needed a little help in terms of cleanup. There was dirt and mold, and it was basically black. I had to research how to clean a fridge. I got vinegar and baking soda and, like, all-purpose spray that gets rid of oils and stuff like that. We spent a whole afternoon, probably a good two hours, cleaning the fridge. There was even mold in the vents.

The funny thing is, when we were looking at apartments, some had refrigerators and some didn’t, but we weren’t even thinking about that. We were more concerned about getting the place we wanted. It just feels funny that a fridge is not even a factor for choosing an apartment. That was completely normalized. — Askia Vargas Toure, musician and educator

Good Riddance to New York City’s Tenant-Paid Broker Fee

Topped With a Barrel-Vaulted Roof, a Washington, D.C. Midcentury Seeks $510K

Designed by Charles M. Goodman, the townhome has an updated kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows, and two airy upper-level bedrooms with curvaceous ceilings.

Designed by Charles M. Goodman, this townhome has an updated kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows, and two airy upper-level bedrooms with curvaceous ceilings.

Location: 341 O St SW, Washington, DC

Price: $509,900

Year Built: 1962

Architect: Charles M. Goodman

Footprint: 1,710 square feet (3 bedrooms, 2 baths)

From the Agent: "Live your midcentury-modern dreams in this barrel-roof beauty by iconic architect Charles M. Goodman. Inside, warm parquet floors, soaring barrel ceilings, and clean lines set the vibe. The main level flows from stylish living and dining spaces to a brand-new, retro-cool terrazzo and tile kitchen that’s ready to host. Enjoy mornings on your private, shaded terrace that extends the indoor living area. Upstairs, there are two large, barrel-vaulted bedrooms with all kinds of storage, along with a glass-tiled full bath. Parking is available to lease."

Charles M. Goodman, the home's architect, has a storied career in the Washington D.C. suburbs, as well as serving as the head architect at the United States Treasury Department and the Air Transport Command. — Charles M. Goodman is renowned for his residential work in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and he also served as the head architect at the United States Treasury Department and the Air Transport Command.

Photo courtesy of BTW images

See the full story on Dwell.com: Topped With a Barrel-Vaulted Roof, a Washington, D.C. Midcentury Seeks $510K
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