In the spring edition of the magazine Magnolia, editor Joanna Gaines writes: “When I think about balance in design and food, I’m drawn more to harmony than perfect symmetry. In a home, it’s the blend of old and new, soft curves and hard lines, investment pieces and vintage finds that creates a truly lived-in look.” Magnolia, issue 34, Balance, spring 2025, pg. 8.

A rising trend in the under-30 demographic, “granny core”, captures the essence of the search for this kind of balance. This generation of mostly women, seeks to fill their homes and their daily lives with vintage treasures, time-won recipes and handicrafts that denote time spent at Gramma’s house. Ironically, this is also the generation that has popularized cutting off family for the sake of setting healthy boundaries and establishing one’s own voice.

In every generation, there have been people who have left the family farm, hometown and familiar spaces for opportunities elsewhere. Look no further than the closed cod fisheries of Newfoundland that spawned an exodus of young people to go west, many landing jobs in the oil fields of Alberta. Family farming became untenable resulting in farmers sending their children for education in jobs that would inevitably take them far from home. (Hallmark might have us believe that eventually all these young lawyers and doctors end up going home for the holidays where they fall in love and remain but there is only so much room for those professionals in a town of under five thousand.)

For those who didn’t have that full-circle moment, whose only visits back home were short and temporary, they passed on to their own children the potential of careers and lives lived away from family. They would take their children on long treks to see distant relatives but home was a place where connections are forged, not through familial ties, but through school and church, work and social activities. These is nothing wrong with that but it does make for a different kind of family dynamic and it seems that some are trying to fill that void by going back to the old ways at least in some aspects of their lives.

These under-30ish professionals are looking for more than financial success and independence. They are decorating those high rise apartments, those industrial-leaning lofts with throw blankets that they are crocheting themselves. They are spending hard earned paychecks on recipe books to replicate Gramma’s cooking for their annual Friendsgiving dinners. They are filling their homes with vintage finds from thrift stores (which are enjoying their new cool reputation.) They are posting on social media and gathering huge followings of young people who, like themselves, are searching for roots, for signposts of the generations past. I think they are also searching for the stability and wisdom that we so often associate with our grandparents generation.

Our homes are a reflection of ourselves and of what we value. The popularity of vinyl, Grannycore and TikTok book clubs reveal a generation reaching back to grab hold of the very best of their grandparents’ time and that should tell us that something is missing in the way we live now. This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a message to our world. At the breakneck pace of the life we currently lead we are missing something vital. Something you used to be able to find at Gramma’s house. A warm welcome, a comfortable hug, a safe place to just be.

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