I’m a millennial and a woodworker, and I kinda need to rant a little.

I hate dining room hutches/cupboards.

My parents asked me to design and build a cupboard for their dining room. As I started looking around on the internet for design ideas to mash together into something that fits their whole deal, I started noticing a pattern. There are three kinds of pictures of hutches on the internet:

1. The cabinet is empty floating in a white void or has a few props on it in a sparsely furnished room, for marketing the cabinet itself.
2. Grandma’s old cabinet full of floral print china that may not have once ever served a meal in 70 years.
3. A diorama of basic bitchery, typically hosted on Pinterest, featuring distressed white chalk paint, several pieces of Rae Dunn crockery, a word like “Gather” made of scroll sawn wood, and a ceramic pig.

I cannot find any photographic evidence that 21st century Americans use dining room hutches to store things they regularly use. And I fucking hate it. It’s nothing but a trophy case to consumerism. “Here’s the thousand dollar cabinet we keep dishes in that will NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES touch food.”

It’s one facet of my “household furniture has cancer” belief. I’ll show you another of those facets:

There will never be an antique computer desk because no one really makes new heirloom computer desks. The woodworking traditions that gave us things like the shaker table and the morris chair kinda died during WWII and are now practiced the same way we practice jousting or flint knapping: something something living history. When PC’s became widespread in the 90’s, you see three kinds of computer desk arise:

1. Just a table someone already had that doesn’t have enough room so there’s another table next to it and stuff on the floor.
2. An abstract stack of laminated particle board slabs held up by steel tubes designed for the purpose but still didn’t have room for everything.
3. A stack of laminated particle board slabs designed to look like an executive pillar desk, a weird combination of a pillar desk with a dining room hutch, or an armoire for some reason.

Then the laptop era happened, then the phone/tablet era happened, now look back at what PC gamers are using with their monitors and towers: A wooden slab with metal T shaped legs.

I could say the same for other electronics-related furniture such as television stands. No notable crafts movement has emerged to fill the needs of 21st century lives, everyone buys flat packed particle board crap that is meant to look like one kind of furniture while being something else, like an “entertainment center” that looks like a credenza or the aforementioned computer desk that looks like an armoire.

I hate it, and I plan to take to my table saw and do something about it.

If you loved the look of your “good china” and wanted to enjoy it every day, but couldn’t afford to replace broken or chipped or worn-down pieces all the time, displaying it was safer than using it every day. You could eat off the same old plate, whether it’s a damaged part of the set or something else entirely, while looking at the pretty ones you’re not having to wash (or even dust often, if behind glass). Then for big fancy gatherings you’d have enough nice ones for everyone.

Edit: Looking at OP’s picture brings me memories of long-ago college parties, so it’s a similar reminder of good times with good friends that old grandmas might get from looking at their china case.

old people want to flex that they could host an impromptu party for royalty. its some old world bullshit.

Cheap version of this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_cabinet

Found the teenager.