Holistic Home

Colors are soft, aromatherapy and ethnic cooking are booming and filtered water has gone mainstream.

Those are a few of the trends expected to predominate at the 1999 International Housewares Show, which opens Sunday in Chicago’s McCormick Place Exposition Center.

With more than 2,000 manufacturers and marketers from 33 countries, the annual show is the world’s largest housewares marketplace. Its acres of new humidifiers, dinnerware, pots, pans, blenders, toasters and other housewares provide a frenzied shopping spree for the approximately 15,000 buyers who are anticipating retail needs for the upcoming year in major department stores, hardware stores, home centers and supermarkets.

“The buyers are from the trade--they are in touch with the consumers, and they are reflecting how people are living today,” said Lisa Casey-Weiss, a New Yorker who is a lifestyle consultant for the housewares show.

The ever-growing show--vendors will represent 60 countries--has been reformatted this year, she said, into four expos throughout the McCormmick Place Complex: kitchen, dining and small appliances; home organization and cleaning; seasonal, pets and international products; and home decor, including furniture and lighting.

“The show is so large it can be overwhelming,” Casey-Weiss said.

But it can also be instructive. The new products are more stylish every year, as design considerations play into the simplest items--a new Tupperware vegetable peeler designed by Morison S. Cousins is exhibited as sculptural design at the Milwaukee Art Museum. And the home products also reflect changing lifestyle patterns.

“Last year we saw a casual living trend, and this year it has really blossomed,” Casey-Weiss said. “Even in dinnerware, people are taking one or more patterns and mixing them with solid colors to create their own pattern.”

*

The continuing interest in home that has characterized this decade indicates a gradual shift in the American psyche, she said.

“We are evolving from a casual to a more spiritual lifestyle,” she said.

This year’s housewares show abounds with products once labeled “New Age,” such as aromatherapy machines of every ilk, scented candles and alarm clocks that sound like rain or comforting bird chirps.

Even the colors this year are calming, she said, with soothing shades of blue replacing last year’s bright yellows.

“And the emphasis on wellness is still growing,” she said. “Water purification is just going mainstream, and we see more massagers and other stress-relief equipment.”

Many of these products first gained acceptance on the West Coast, Casey-Weiss noted. A culinary ethnic celebration is one such trend now sweeping the country. This year’s housewares show offers a global proliferation of electric tortilla makers, Moroccan tagines, Japanese steak pans and Korean barbecue grills.

Offsetting the plethora of new kitchen equipment is the reality that consumers continue to be pressed for time. In fact, said Casey-Weiss, 38% of Americans say prepared foods-to-go are essential. This has led to a “food in a flurry” trend that has produced more portable storage / heating appliances to keep takeout food warm, to better identify leftovers and to carry lunches to work or school.

“What’s great about the housewares show is it serves as an economic bellwether, but it also reflects how people live,” Casey-Weiss said.

*

The idea that a stream of kitchen products can serve as anthropological indicators is echoed by consultant A.J. Riedel of Riedel Marketing Group in Phoenix. She monitors consumer attitudes and behavior for the housewares industry and recently released a report tracking changes over the last two years.

She, too, found an interest in personal well-being that is less pure diet- and exercise-oriented and more holistic.

“Consumers are looking at their home as a sanctuary away from an increasingly hostile world,” she said. “We found an interesting dichotomy. Respondents felt that their home was their sanctuary but there are dangers there too, like food-borne illness and air and water quality.”

Her major finding, to no one’s surprise, is that “people are feeling even more time pressure than two years ago and our already-shrinking leisure time is getting even smaller.”

*

The result is a mental struggle with our value systems, Riedel said. “We want a spotless house, much like our mothers had, but in reality that is not possible and we have to relax our standards.”

Nonetheless, more time will be spent on housecleaning in 1999 than it was two years ago, she said, and also more time on food preparation. It’s not true that the kitchen is becoming a museum piece.

“My research does bear out that we don’t have a lot of time to cook, but it doesn’t bear out that we don’t cook at all,” she said. “People still value the family dinner, which presents another contemporary dilemma: You are torn between the core value of wanting to provide home-cooked, wholesome meals to be shared, and the fact that there are only so many hours in a day and everybody is busy.”

It is Riedel’s hope that the housewares industry in 1999 will focus on appliances that make cooking easier and faster “rather than yet another coffee maker with digital readout and a gold filter.”