The Atlantic

What Do Early KonMari Adopters’ Homes Look Like Now?

The reflections of more than a dozen people who did dedicated cleanouts of their living spaces years ago
Source: Hekla / Dasha Petrenko / GoodMood Photo / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

For Martin Law, Marie Kondo’s tidying regimen was life-changing, until it wasn’t. Law, a 32-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, went through with most of Kondo’s popular tidying method two years ago. “I managed to get rid of a great deal of items that I previously had found difficult to let go of,” he told me, including about half of his clothing.

After Law’s big cleanout, though, the stuff gradually crept back in. His kitchen gained a series of useful but not vital devices: a new cookie cutter, a larger whisk, a machine for making peanut butter. The accumulations of the past two years have added up. “The house is probably no better than it was—perhaps marginally better, but in reality probably no better,” he says. His commitment to having very little has, he confesses, petered out.

“If you adopt this approach—the KonMari Method—you’ll never revert to clutter again,” wrote Marie Kondo in , published in the United States in the fall of 2014.

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