Take an inventory of the things in your home, and you'd likely lose track at the wardrobe alone. Imagine, then, limiting your domestic possessions to just 100.
Dave Bruno, an American digital marketing teacher, threw down the gauntlet after he looked around his home one day and realised how much his possessions were weighing him down. Thus began his 100 Thing Challenge, a blog about it guynameddave.com and a worldwide collective light-bulb moment that Yes! this is what I've been yearning for: a simpler, less consumer-focused, clutter-free existence.
The slow-home movement - a term ostensibly coined in 2006 by Canadian architect John Brown slowhomestudio.com - begins with basic design. Just as slow cooking is the antithesis of fast food, so the slow-home approach is considered, calm and intuitive. Railing against what he views as a tide of badly designed housing (which is 57 per cent of all North American dwellings, he claims), Brown reasons that a "lack of attention to the fundamentals of good design makes a fast house difficult to live in and hard on the environment".
[Bad] design makes a fast house difficult to live in and hard on the environment
His "12 steps to a slow home" design premise is based on set criteria such as location, size, orientation and stewardship.
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Meng Koach felt he was a victim of "clutter creep". "Overwhelmed" by the amount of stuff in his life, the graphic designer from New Zealand resolved to cast out all but 100 possessions when he moved to Sydney, Australia. Admittedly, the cutlery drawer didn't count - as a student in a shared house, there wasn't much of that - but he did pare back shoes to three pairs, jeans to two and electronic devices to the bare minimum.
Koach had wanted to downsize, and the 100 Thing Challenge gave him a target. Surprisingly (to him), the final count came to just 82. He found it hard to "be brutal" in the cull, but ultimately, immensely liberating.
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Personal organiser Lindsay Faber, a slow-home proponent and founder of Sorted www.getsorted.com.au has a compelling argument for downsizing: getting rid of clutter can reduce housework by up to 40 per cent, she says. "Not to mention the time wasted looking for lost items and the costs saved by not buying duplicates of things you know you already have but cannot find."
Though she's Sydney-based, Faber says the living environments of her clients are not so different to Hong Kong. "Our inner-city apartments are also small, with limited storage space," she says.
