<em>Resimercial</em>: The Terrible Word for Today’s Trendy Office Aesthetic
Domestic touches have become popular in workplace design, further blurring the line between work and home.
Look at the style of an office in any given era and you’ll get a glimpse of the defining themes in white-collar workers’ lives at the time.
In booming postwar America, for example, the profusion of GI Bill–educated office workers wore suits, and many workplaces were sleek, serious, and formal. The goal was to signal prestige, according to Louise Mozingo, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley and the author of Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. “White-collar was a serious distinction because your father was probably a farmer or a blue-collar laborer,” she told me.
These days, most workplaces are much
