In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Viennese architect Adolf Loos waxed magnanimous: “I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.” Italics his.

A century later, my LinkedIn profile photo displays the perfect image of cultural evolution: a lithe figure poised languidly in a gleaming, modern kitchen, with nary an ornament in sight. Silhouetted against a huge, aluminum-framed window, I betray no soccer mom frippery, no deluxe range hoods, knick-knack shelves, or wayward papers. This is the house, and the self-image, I like to project to my colleagues.

No, the person in the picture is not me. It’s a photographer’s model, the type of human prop for the slick New York magazine in which my house was featured, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? The cool, modernist backdrop is what matters. This is the kind of house I’ve been writing about for the past twenty years, and that I’ve finally had the chance to live in.

The opportunity beckoned in 2009 when, as I scanned the Internet for our next family home, up popped a specimen more rare than sunshine in Vancouver: a modernist house for rent. The posting showed a gorgeous, grey-tiled bathroom, the shower stall and toilet encased in glass, which segued openly and unblushingly into a bedroom. One corner of a pillowcase led the eye to the bed’s built-in cabinetry, which held a neat stack of books. Here was a house that reflected a clean, tidy soul — at least that’s the subtext of the current writing on modernism. In babbling lifestyle magazines and ponderous academic journals, we hover around the idea that minimalism is a moral imperative that can transform our lives. And since anyone can now afford to stuff a house with cheap bric-a-brac, the look of stark nothingness has become virtuous, in the same way that the advent of inexpensive food made it cool to be skinny. But architecture is about more than being cool. We design experts champion a way of life. Like a surprising number of my peers in this glamorous industry, I’m a slovenly sort. What if this modern house could change my life? What greater opportunity to test our collective thesis?

On our initial tour, we approached the front entrance by climbing up a metal staircase, over a Zen garden that surrounds the house like a moat. Huge windows flood every inch of the interior with light. White cabinets dominate the main floor, and the walls and ceilings, devoid of baseboards or cornices, seem to float around them. The kitchen, living, and dining zones flow into each other. With no fridge or range in sight, it’s unclear just where the kitchen is. But — yay! — no tyrannical predefining of the use of a space, as we design writers might say.

My inner critic starts drafting a story in my mind: Note how, halfway into the kitchen area, the floor unexpectedly steps down and the ceiling rises up, which generates space for a sub-grade room and triggers a dynamically expansive spatial narrative. But in short order, my twee critic’s mindset yields to plebeian, housewifely considerations: No nooks or baseboards to dust! Built-in cabinets to hold all our crap! As we stroll around, nine-year-old Natalie’s eyes bug out, and twelve-year-old Julia digs her fingers into my arm. The second we step off the property, my daughters plead with me to rent it, because, they chime in unison, “it’s so-o-o cool.”

One would hardly describe the houses we have inhabited so far as cool. My spouse and I are serial renters, taking a short-term lease on a different furnished house every year while we wait in vain for Vancouver real estate prices to settle down. This approach has its merits, because it enables us to hone in on which type of house works best for us. But all the homes we have rented hark back to the traditional, with their peaked roofs, mullioned windows, crown mouldings, and overstuffed armchairs. Now, lo, a rental house that emphatically defied all those cozy semiotics. My mate’s eyes glimmered with the hope of a reprieve from the squalor I had generated in other abodes. Our daughters’ eyes shone with the promise of a home that looked like a rocket ship.

We signed a one-year lease on what the children immediately dubbed the “moderny house” — a childish expression that’s apropos for contemporary modernism: an adjective, no longer a revolution. Still, now I could live the dream and go from slovenly to sleek, almost by osmosis.

A century ago, families worried about poverty and the plague, not clutter and kitsch. Death lurked in the swag curtains and fetid air of the Victorian parlour. “The machine we live in is an old crate of a plane riddled with tuberculosis,” wrote Le Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto, Vers une architecture. Modernism, he argued, would bring us health, happiness, liberty, and family unity. The book’s accompanying images of airplanes, race cars, steel bridge framework, and prairie grain silos championed the industrial as aesthetic by its very nature: in an era of food shortages, war, and disease, technology offered more hope than tradition could.

Modernism no longer holds a monopoly on the virtues of economy and hygiene. Any vinyl-windowed townhome can deliver that. Instead, the movement’s enduring appeal comes from its lean, smooth look, which offers a sense of purity or, rather, the modern paradigm of purity: coolness.