A Home Without a Fridge Chaos Collage Is a Home Without Joy

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A couple of years back, our refrigerator died, and my wife and I suffered the indignity of having to swap in a new one basically in real time. I think many of us—renters and homeowners alike—have been there. There’s never a good time to lose a fridge. In our rental apartment in Brooklyn, I remember our landlord dropped off a “new” refrigerator that gave off the distinct aroma of a chain-smoker’s basement. The model featured an ancient GE logo, and the handle fell off a few weeks later. In all fairness, the appliance worked fine for a decade, and the Marlboro Red bouquet eventually wore off.

In our current home, I was tasked with buying a new fridge over a holiday weekend and visited a local appliance store to select a new model. While the installation would require some minor woodwork—our specs were a little challenging, given that we had bought our house from a former builder who fancied all things custom—I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I walked in. The only thing that truly mattered was that the face of the refrigerator was magnetized.

The kitchen design world has spent the last 20 years telling us to hide our refrigerators. Think of the concealed, built-in aesthetic seen on Bravo shows, the ads in Condé publications, and in the oftentimes bland Architectural Digest home tours. (We all still watch most of them, yeah?) And the appliance industry spent that same time selling us stainless steel refrigerators—which, in a plot twist, oftentimes aren’t even magnetic.

When I eventually landed on a model that fit our specs and was magnetic, it felt like a small victory. What I didn’t realize until we had to physically move everything from the old fridge to the new one was how much of our life was pinned to that surface. Having that chaotic collage of memories greet us many times (so many times) a day was a visual reminder of life lived—and a literal reminder about upcoming Jewish holidays, great grandma-style pizza a dial away, some extremely random roadtrips, and life events when a wedding or bat mitzvah invitation takes its temporary place amid the permanent collection.

Here’s my current fridge chaos collage:

I have a few thoughts about how we’ve “curated” this collage. Tamar and I really haven’t discussed the process. Items have simply ended up there, and over time, we’ve swapped them in and out depending on available space and how we are feeling.

Photos: Photos are obviously a major part of the mix. Parents often slap a school photo or two on the fridge, and we’ve enjoyed updating our nieces’ and nephew’s slots with the turn of the school calendar. In our current chaos collage, we have snaps from the UFO Fair in Pine Bush with our friends Steve and Stacey, and a picture of my father-in-law smoking a cigarette during Purim on his moshav in Israel. He was maybe 14—it was a different time. This photo gets the biggest laugh when we have visitors hanging out in our kitchen. There’s a snapshot of my high school tennis days, and one of Tamar and her sister looking really cute as kids. Is there any specific reason these particular photos were selected? Not really, and that’s the fun part. They’re representative of important people in our lives, who we are reminded of each time we reach for a can of Polar Seltzer.

Magnets: Unlike with the photos, I have a real strategy for my magnets. Whenever I visit a new place, whether city or country, I try to find a magnet to add to my collection. I know, I know, this is edging into the cringe “places I’ve visited” dots-on-a-map display. But stay with me. The destination magnet is a real art form. Sometimes you’ll find a true handmade piece, all weird and irregular, like Pulcinella, the iconic Neapolitan commedia dell’arte character, riding a moped. There are reminders of trips to Palm Springs, British Columbia, Jeju Island, Lecce, Houston, Ireland, and Portland (not sure if it’s Maine or Oregon). While making dinner, I’ll latch onto one of the destination magnets, and a memory will pop into my head. It’s a fun exercise to see what image comes first. Promotional (swag) magnets also find their place. Khushbu Shah sent some really cool ones as part of the promo for her book, Amrikan. My mom gifted me a magnet of Detroit pizza taxonomy, and it’s one of my new favorites.

Art: For the parents out there, kid art likely takes up the most space, and there is no better element for a chaos fridge collage. If the kid is proud of their work, it’s nice to pay some respect by offering it prime real estate—though it’s not required for the permanent collection. Our niece Ari sent us a heart message that might be an expression of “you are the best,” yet “you are the beef” is also a possibility. That’s in our permanent collection. One of my favorite pieces of art is a caricature drawing from a trip to Seoul in 2013. I returned to the same artist almost ten years later for an update. And I love having magnets on my fridge from my two favorite pizzerias in the world, Franny’s and Danny Boy’s.

Stickers, et cetera: Stickers work best when they’re not adhered to the surface of your fridge. This offers the opportunity to use small affixing magnets of various sizes and fun shapes. We rep Michigan, Virginia Beach, and Palm Springs hard in our household, and we found some fun stickers to place. I’ve also made a habit of picking up a museum exhibition postcards if the show strikes me. The collection includes a photo from Malick Sidibé, the legendary Malian party photographer, during a retrospective at the Fondation Cartier back in 2017. I very much liked that show, and I love this magnet. Probably my single most prized magnet was a gift from our good friends Jon and Erin. It features several print ads from my dad’s record store, Boogie Records, that they found and collaged.

I’ll close with an image from that old GE that sat in our apartment back in Brooklyn. I took it a few days before removing our fridge collage for our move upstate, to create a record of that time and place—and all the memories going back. These refrigerator chaos collages are all temporary. Fridges and homes come and go, and in this renter’s world, you often can’t pick where you are moving.

A stainless steel fridge with a smudge-resistant, non-magnetic finish is easy to clean and that’s about it. The magnetic chaos collage fridge takes more work to maintain and gives you so much more. I know which one I’m buying forever.

Hafiz Mangalji is the founder of Hyunah Coffee Club, a reservations-only members’ space. We had a great talk and covered:

✔️ Defining coffee’s 4th wave and why home coffee has hit a new gear ☕️📈

✔️ His space in Greenpoint is insane. So much gear - grinders, espresso, hand brewing, water treatment. It’s intense. 🧐

✔️ How the $30/month membership works. I highly recommend trying a day pass. Reservation only.

✔️ His favorite coffees, and why Paris is the center of specialty coffee today 🇫🇷

✔️ This space is not a training center or lab. It’s for home coffee fans. It was a real vibe.

LISTEN: For the Semisecret Coffee Club in New York, Membership Has Its Perks