Last year, during the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
These were not the unglamorous windows familiar to Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan. His wealthier clients seemed to gravitate toward ACs that looked like they had undergone plastic surgery: their hard edges softened, their faces sculpted and smoothed.
On Park Avenue, he installed an air conditioner from July, a startup that sells window air conditioners in graceful, rounded shapes with pastel coverings. He scoured Home Depots for six curvy Midea air conditioners for a single customer on the Upper West Side. Others opted for Windmill, which touts its minimalist unit on Instagram as a “sleek and chic transformation moment.”
Several companies are trying to capitalize on increasingly unbearable summers by offering a fleet of photogenic window air conditioners aimed at fashionable customers and affable people living in buildings without central air conditioning. Their products are more expensive than the average window air conditioner ($340 to nearly $600), and their marketing sometimes glosses over details, emphasizing sleek exteriors rather than BTUs.
“These kinds of things, you’re paying for the aesthetics,” Mr. Medley said.
Media coverage of these products has been breathtaking, sometimes bordering on eroticism. “Help! I’m Sexually Attracted to My New Smart Air Conditioner,” read a recent headline in Vice’s product recommendation vertical. The Wall Street Journal described a wave of refreshed air conditioners as “sexy.”
As air conditioning becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity, some customers are willing to shell out money for a device that looks like an iPad or the loving robot from “Wall-E.” But there’s something troubling about air conditioning becoming so coveted through the combined efforts of slick marketing and extreme heat. We are used to it-bags and it-girls; Is there a more worrying sign of the climate crisis than the arrival of air conditioning in fashion?
Everything except a household appliance
Window air conditioners are a particularly troublesome part of New York City life. That’s largely because the sought-after prewar buildings are expensive to retrofit with central air conditioning, a more efficient system that cools two-thirds of U.S. homes, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“There are at least three episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ that talk about window air conditioners,” said Rodrigo Teixeira, head of product management for home comfort for appliance company Midea America. “Nowadays you see million-dollar houses, or two-million-dollar apartments, with windows stuck to the windows.” (The ultra-wealthy, of course, are more likely to live in newer buildings with central air conditioning and have no use for windows.)
Midea America says it has sold more than 1 million U-shaped air conditioners, launched in 2020, which allow a window to close into a channel in the center of the unit. The same year, July joined the race with its air conditioner with interchangeable front panels. Another company, Windmill, began selling a marshmallow-shaped window air conditioner in 2021.
Jess Brush, 31, a nail artist, abandoned the two “horrible” windows on her Hudson Valley farm last year. Hotter summers have prompted her to spend more on attractive air conditioners, which stay in her window for more and more months each year.
She ordered two Windmill units for $400 each after seeing them on social media. “They would be displayed in beautiful homes that are homes you would want,” she said. “They seemed like an ambitious object. »
Air conditioners are ubiquitous on social media, in part because the companies behind them sometimes provide free units to influencers who create content focused on home decor and fashion. Anna B. Albury, 28, a Brooklyn rug designer and founder of the newsletter “coolstuff.nyc,” reached out to July last month and received two free air conditioners in exchange for sharing an Instagram Reel with her 10,000 followers.
“It’s clear who they’re talking to,” she said. “It’s about young people who live in a town that doesn’t have central air conditioning, but who care about what their house looks like. »
The consumer can now choose from upgraded versions of all sorts of household essentials: televisions framed to look like paintings and refrigerators disguised as cabinets. Air-conditioner manufacturers now seem eager to distance themselves from outdated products such as microwaves and ceiling fans.
“We create home decorations that happen to be air devices,” said Michael Mayer, founder and CEO of Windmill.
According to Allen St. John, a senior product editor who works on Consumer Reports’ air conditioner rankings, the new line of sleek air conditioners varies widely in quality. Mr. St. John praised Midea’s U-shaped unit, which he said was energy efficient and efficient in testing.
But he criticized Windmill’s most affordable WhisperTech units, which struggled to cool a room quickly. “It’s the most important test we do, and it performed as poorly as any air conditioner we’ve tested,” St. John said.
Mr. Mayer, Windmill’s chief executive, noted that the product had been reviewed more positively elsewhere, including by Wirecutter, the New York Times’ product-recommendation site, adding that the company had “tens of thousands of satisfied customers who love our WhisperTech models.”
The July air conditioner wasn’t tested by Consumer Reports, but Albert Wong, 46, who lives in Orange County, Calif., said he has mixed feelings about the Wi-Fi-enabled unit he bought last summer for $500. It doesn’t perform noticeably better than other air conditioners he’s owned, he said; it just seems trendy.
A software developer, Mr. Wong was unable to change the device’s remote control app from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
The age of AC “status”
In 2020, a Wall Street Journal article described a group of avant-garde air conditioners, including one from July, as “summer’s most unlikely status symbol” — a phrase the brand has since reused, in large print, in its marketing materials.
High-end and fashionable products are frequently slapped with the “status” label. But applying it to air conditioners is an acknowledgement, however unwitting, of the reality that access to fresh air is a matter of wealth and status, and a growing measure of inequality as the world warms.
Muhammad Saigol, founder and chief executive of July, said the descriptor was “nice and catchy” but the company’s goal was to appeal to customers interested in design, without snobbery. “We don’t view it as a status symbol, rather we view it as a reflection of your individual taste and personality,” he said.
Air conditioners are somewhat similar to the stylized air purifiers that took off in the early days of Covid, said Ben Varquez, chief executive of YMC, a marketing agency geared toward millennials and Gen Z. They, too, offered customers with disposable income an extra layer of comfort in the midst of an overwhelming crisis, in the form of an attractive accessory.
People don’t like to be scared by advertising, he said. “Using climate change as the underlying message, but putting a little lipstick on the pig, is probably going to be a lot more successful,” he said. “People want to feel good about spending money.”
Air conditioning is a climate change trap; it’s both a cure for and a contributor to rising global temperatures. The companies behind these air conditioners tout their efficiency and environmentally friendly refrigerants, and July and Windmill also buy carbon offsets, a method of combating emissions that has been criticized by some scientists as ineffective.
“Ultimately, people are going to have to buy air conditioners, and they’re going to have to buy more air conditioners, and they’re going to have to use them more” as temperatures rise, Mr. Mayer, the Windmill’s chief executive, said. “We want people to buy an air conditioner from an environmentally conscious brand rather than from a big appliance company.”
But in many cases, the most environmentally friendly air conditioner is one you already own, said Sandra Goldmark, a designer and senior associate dean at the Columbia Climate School. “Even if the new unit is more energy efficient, it will take you a long time to pay back the embedded carbon” that was used to create your new unit, she said.
Goldmark said she understands why customers want a better-looking air conditioner in their home (even if it reminds her of Apple devices, which are notoriously difficult to open and repair). She still feels uncomfortable with well-designed window air conditioners, which she says offer a similar appeal to trash cans hidden under marble countertops.
“It erases our impact, in a way; it makes it all very acceptable and beautiful,” she said. “It creates a kind of comfortable illusion that everything is fine. »
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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