The ’90s are calling, and people are picking up—landline in hand, cord twirled around finger. One of the latest home trends to take hold, particularly among millennials and zoomers, is a nostalgic embrace of ’90s and early-aughts technology: Think VHS tapes, tiny TVs perched on kitchen counters, and the aforementioned house phone. For those of us who grew up during that brief time when the rapidly evolving internet lent a sense of optimism to our perception of technology, there is a comforting allure in returning to the tech we remember from our childhoods—particularly as the World Wide Web devolves to doomscrolling content and AI slop.
Ironically, this trend has taken hold on TikTok (the well-established siren of scary screen time stats), where the algorithm keeps serving up videos of people showing off their 2000s-inspired small kitchen TVs. A quick search on the platform turns up countless results of vloggers gushing over the throwback item, including more than 1,000 videos captioned with the hashtag “kitchentv,” most framing it as a nostalgic nod to the past; televisions became more affordable than ever in the ’80s and ’90s, and pint-sized sets started cropping up in the heart of the home. This predated the rise of the open floor plan, so those who wanted to keep up with their soaps while making lunch had to buy a separate TV to tune in from the kitchen.
Content creator Kennedy Rose styled her countertop TV nook to play up her kitchen’s existing Y2K-style honey oak cabinetry: Picture cookbooks from the aughts, braided garlic, and a small lamp with a pleated shade adding warmth to the corner with the Gilmore Girls–playing device. Others eschew Netflix entirely in favor of boxy secondhand sets with built-in VCR or DVD players on which to watch thrifted copies of Jurassic Park or Dawson’s Creek.
“I’ve found myself actually spending more time in the kitchen because it’s there,” says Rose, who flips on childhood favorites—PBS cartoons, among them—to lighten the drudgery of adult tasks like cooking or doing the dishes. “It’s usually something that’s a comfort [show] that I’ve seen a million times…. It’s like a little warm hug.”
“We’re losing so many really personal touches through digitizing everything”
Sophia Diamond, a 32-year-old living in Virginia, opted to go a different nostalgic route in her kitchen. She replaced her smart speaker with an under-the-cabinet radio and CD player sourced from eBay. “We love it because it doesn’t take up any counter space. It has a physical, very reliable timer,” says Diamond, who regularly shares TikToks chronicling her low-tech lifestyle goals—habits that she picked up in order to rely less on her phone. One of the bonuses of collecting physical media is a more personalized space with built-in conversation starters. “We’re losing so many really personal touches through digitizing everything,” she laments. “I ultimately feel betrayed, because in the early days of technology, we were sold this idea of expansion and connection, and now we’re seeing the results that the opposite is tending to be true.”
Diamond recently quit her corporate tech job, and though she once considered herself “a tech optimist,” she’s now taking time off to explore her creative interests—and to expand her physical media collection. She’s aiming to reroute her career toward something more community-oriented. Embracing the Y2K aesthetic “definitely feels like home,” she explains. “It has that nostalgic comfort factor [because] this is what houses looked like when I was a kid, and all I had to worry about was being a kid.”
Erin Mackaman, a 27-year-old who recently converted to a Luddite-lite lifestyle, is another CD devotee. “Streaming was just getting really stale,” she explains. Plus, the CDs double as decor in the same way she enjoys displaying her books. “I want to be surrounded by the things that I spend time with. And if it’s all just on my computer screen, most of the time, that’s just a black square,” Mackaman says. “It’s just this void. And it’s much more appealing to have a physical little area, a dedicated space [for] something that I like doing.”
The recent AD tour of Mélanie Masarin’s stylishly down-to-earth Paris apartment executes this trend in the chic manner you’d expect from the Ghia founder; she installed a wall-mounted Beosound 9000 CD player that displays six discs at a time in her Paris apartment.
Out of the matrix and into physical media
Blockbuster video stores may be gone (RIP), but as a growing number of fatigued consumers streamline their media intake by forgoing the laundry list of (constantly rebranding, sometimes bundled?) subscription streaming platforms in favor of physical media, new businesses are stepping in to meet the demand. Earlier this year, Night Owl Video, which sells DVDs and VHS tapes, opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “People are getting wise to this idea that you don’t really own the digital things you supposedly own, and the only way you truly own something is to own it physically,” owner Aaron Hamel told The New York Times in July. “We’re shocked by the number of college-age people coming in and buying a couple five-dollar DVDs to go home and watch together.”
Of course, a collection of physical media necessitates a fashionable space to show it off. There was a time when you had to go to technology—before it was always on your person. Remember the computer room? “We used to respect the computer,” mused a viral 2023 tweet with a picture of an old-school desk, set up with the works: a clunky desktop, a printer, built-in CD-ROM storage. Mackaman, who works from home and got rid of her smartphone, has adopted a similar setup. For her, the internet isn’t an inescapable matrix; it’s just a corner in a room. “When I turn it off and I go and exist in the rest of the house, it feels like I’m leaving that behind in a really nice way.”
While many display their music and movies on whatever existing bookshelf they have, some take special care to make their physical media a focal point, whether it be a pair of vertical Bruno Rainaldi bookcases stacked with VHS tapes, a curvy CD tower straight from 1999, or this handsome dark wood CD storage box with rounded corners. And then there’s Matt Parker, whose entire basement (chronicled on Instagram @vintagevideobasement) is devoted to his vintage electronics and physical media collections—albeit with a more ’70s and ’80s style. Wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpeting complement his VHS tapes, which are prominently displayed in plastic space age shelves designed by Olaf Van Bohr for Kartell in a neon orange hue.
On the chain, off the hook
And that brings us back to the landline, which bring us to the gossip bench. Popular in the early to mid 20th century, it provided a comfortable place to sit and chat, with an attached table to keep a phone and a notepad within reach. For now, it seems like even those who haven’t made the jump to a corded phone are craving a singular spot where the cell phone lives at home. Instructions for how to put your iPhone into “landline mode” (notifications off for everything but phone calls, just as it used to be…) went viral this past summer, as did a TikTok of a homemade smartphone wall dock. Going one step further, some are DIY-ing a quasi-landline by literally chaining their phones to the wall. Gen-Z tech writer Tiffany Ng recently did so as a week-long experiment, in which she barred herself from unhooking or charging the device.
TikTok content
“What I’m really interested in is how technology has surpassed a lot of what we need,” Ng tells AD. “It’s providing a lot of convenience for us in a good way, but also it’s encouraging us to interact with [it] in a way that might be a little excessive.” Ng put a slightly uncomfortable straw bench next to the chain to discourage extended doomscrolling. The experience brought her to the conclusion that all the attendant constraints of the lower-tech ’90s and aughts “forced us to be more intentional [with our usage], just because it was so much harder.”
Artist Erin Wakeland has made her phone chain a more permanent fixture. When she is at home, her phone primarily lives on a repurposed chain hanging by her front door, making it “an option, rather than an instinct” to check the device. “I definitely feel more stabilized in my space. It feels grounding,” Wakeland says. “I’m not being very strict and cruel to myself about it. I’m just using it in whatever way it can benefit me.”
Beyond what it offers in terms of a more logged-off lifestyle, there is a sense of glamour to the low-tech life. “I have been obsessed with getting a landline, and my roommate and boyfriend are like, ‘You’re crazy,’ but I really think it would enhance our lives,” says Mackaman. “And my main reason for wanting it was because I watched Sex and the City for the first time last year, and I was like, ‘That’s how I want my life to be. I want to be playing with a cord, kicking my feet in the air, laying on my bed, rolling over,’” she says with a laugh. “Carrie Bradshaw really made it look sexy.” For now, Mackaman is making do with a flip phone. “The only thing I’ve found that is pretty annoying is [that] I have to call myself and type in a code [to] listen to voicemails, which is just a habit change I haven’t quite made yet. I checked the other day and I had seven voicemails, and I was like, ‘I can’t actually handle that right now.’”
