Hey girl, don’t you think it’s time you and I minimized?

Are you a perfectionist when it comes to dating? Not in terms of looks, build, employability, dancing skills, or personality – heck, you’ll take whatever package they come in provided that package is streamlined. If your standards are otherwise minimal, yet you find it hard to find that match made in symmetrical heaven it could very well be because you’re a design perfectionist.

You could either clutter up your bedroom with the sort that comes with extraneous bells and whistles, or let his or her minimalism do the talking, like our dear Ryan. He requires no packaging at all. Just a good font and a clever meme: his abs do the rest.

Ryan’s going to start us off at number 1.

2. My biggest deal breaker? I’d have to say…textiles purchased in the IKEA Marketplace.

3. Who needs a sofa when your mattress is as good as mine?

4. I was married. But lorem ipsum dolor, we’re divorced.

5. Particleboard is not part of my lifestyle.

6. Hey, can you find my G-spot? No, to the left. A little more. A centimeter to the right. Yes, that’s it! That perfect wood accented typographical vortex is such a turn on, isn’t it?

7. With curves like yours, who needs crown molding?

8.

9.  __________________________.

10. You can’t get more hardcore than the West Elm catalog. I mean, really. Must we see the shelving inside your cabinets? We get it. You shave.

11. Funny that you say that. My last girlfriend broke up with me because I didn’t come with enough baggage.

12. I’m not a commitment-phobe, per se. I’m just not ready for a kitchen table right now.

13. I’ll be your ottoman if you’ll be my settee.

14. I’m looking for the perfect long-term silhouette to fill up some negative space in my loft. Could you be that shadow?

15. Feel the grain on that rosewood credenza file cabinet sourced from the Herman Miller mid-century archives: that’s boyfriend material.

16. I think I’ve seen your picture somewhere before. Oh yeah, that’s right. It was in the dictionary next to equilibrium.

17. You complete me.

18. I won’t cramp your style, or closet.

19. You had me at Blanched Seashell White.

20.

 ALSO CHECK OUT:

20 Pick Up Lines for Knitters

25 Pick Up Lines for Cyclists

50 Pick Up Lines for Foodies

Images: Hard Core Nerdity; Architecture Ryan Gosling

The post 20 Pick Up Lines for Minimalists appeared first on EcoSalon.

The monastic and ordered realm of the design perfectionist.

Last week, the world learned of a certain breed of human known as the design perfectionist. They’re a type driven by symmetry, aesthetics, distinct lines and extreme minimalism. So extreme in fact, that many who eschew design most, consider common sense in favor of streamlined simplicity.

Steve Jobs was one, as evidenced by the ever-decreasing convolution of Apple products. Evidenced, too, by an anecdote from his widow Laurene Powell referenced in The New Yorker and recalled in his eponymous biography.

“We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” Powell told Walter Isaacson. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’”

A topical question: one that would really throw the Jobs’ household into a tizzy? The purpose of a sofa that takes up an entire room.

The design perfectionist has never met a sheet she couldn’t tuck.

They also debated washing machines for two weeks at the dinner table. The table itself was undoubtedly a painfully acquired object in its own right. Though, perhaps not as painfully perfect as Todd Waturbury’s apartment per The New York Times.

“It’s not simply that his book collection is restricted to titles with black, gray or white bindings, and stacked jacketless, in neat horizontal rows,” Penelope Green writes. “Or that nearly every item here is also either black, gray or white, including the paint on the walls… there’s an even deeper level of ‘perfect’ at work in this large one-bedroom apartment near Central Park South.”

The money shot of Waturbury’s cherry-picked perfection can be sighted by standing in the “sweet spot” of the apartment, wherein all the lines come together to form some kind of wood accented typographical vortex.

One can only speculate the impact extreme minimalism can have on the health of one’s sex life, though handsome Waturbury is one of the only apparent bachelors in the Times article. Besides, while a date night parlay into the vortex would be a deal breaker for most, for a New Yorker, being featured in The New York Times is natural aphrodisiac enough.

The design perfectionist does not attract dust. 

The Times also mentions Klaus Biesenbach, director of PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. When he travels, he puts anything that moves, including furniture, colored pillows, desktop accessories, into the closet. His own Lower East Side apartment contains a mattress, television and sofa sprung upon him by a houseguest, who also happens to be an artist. As such, the sofa has gained the status of “performance” as opposed to couch, the spectacle being gift giving.

Green delves into the homes and psyches of many other perfectionists, including a minimalist architect who forced his interior designer wife, an admitted hoarder, into living without a sofa for twenty years; an academic whose friends play a dinner party game involving moving objects from their permanent installations in order to see how long it will take their host to notice its misalignment (presumably before he runs off and washes his hands half a dozen times); and another architect who hilariously refers to radiators as “wall acne” and the maximalist who loves him.

The design perfectionist does not need doors.

Psychologically speaking, perfectionism “is a personality trait expressed in a spectrum of behaviors that range from adaptive to maladaptive, appearing as an element of obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

These perfectionists are the maladaptive kind, aesthetes to an almost supernatural degree who would sooner sit on a cold marble floor mindfully before defaulting to anything from Ikea, as so many do, unquestionably. These are also the devout opposites of New Antiquarians who acquire with intent and purpose, but accumulate nonetheless.

The design perfectionist is a fascinating and complex blend of principled aestheticism, exacting indecisiveness, clinical OCD and minimalist snobbery. To be a design perfectionist is very much a state of being, of living very distinctly in a clutter immersed world.

The design perfectionist knows that every object has its place and every place has its object.

Would you want to live with one? Probably not. But they do have their consciousness in check. Why clutter when you can minimize?

Images: Arch Daily; Kaye Tan; Home Interior Design; deluxearch; Convoy

The post The Perfect Minimalist appeared first on EcoSalon.