Minimalism and storage

The minimalist home in the photographs has one problem: the person who lives in it still owns a winter coat, a box of letters, a tent, a guitar and the paperwork of a life. The rooms are calm because those things are somewhere else. This page is about the somewhere else, and about using it without turning it into a second attic.

Updated September 2026

What minimalism actually asks

Strip away the aesthetic and the advice comes down to one test: does this thing earn its place in the room? A chair earns it by being sat in. A book earns it by being read or reread. A coat earns it in a city with a winter, and does not in Saigon, where it is worn on one trip a year. The test is about the room, and rooms in Ho Chi Minh City are small, humid and expensive per square metre. Applied honestly it clears most surfaces. Applied to the whole of a person's possessions it produces the other failure: the person who threw out the camping gear in a fit of clarity and bought it again eighteen months later, at full price, for the same trip. The gap between the two failures is the useful idea. Some things fail the room test and pass the ownership test. They should be owned and not in the room.

Three piles, three destinations

The ownership test is the one people find hard, so here it is in plain terms. Would you buy this again if you lost it? If yes, keep it. If no, but you cannot throw it away because of who gave it to you, that is a sentimental item, and sentimental items pass the test by definition; they just need a box, not a shelf in the living room. If no, and nobody gave it to you, it goes. Storing it costs money every month for something you have already decided you do not want.

The arithmetic

A Small plan is 1,250,000 VND a month for 12 boxes, so a box costs about 104,000 VND a month, or a little over 12,750,000 VND for the whole plan in a year at the 12-month discount. Set that against what the box holds. A box of winter clothes for a family is several million VND to replace. A tent and two sleeping bags, the same. A guitar, more. A box of a child's drawings, not replaceable at any price. The break-even question for each box is whether its replacement cost exceeds its storage cost over the period you expect to keep it, and for most things people hesitate over, it does. Where it does not, the arithmetic is also honest: a box of paperbacks you can buy again for less than a year of storage should be given to a library or a café.

Why storage does not become a hoard

The fear about storage is fair: out of sight, out of mind, and paying monthly for things you have forgotten. That is what happens with a lock-up you rent and fill yourself. It is not what happens with a catalogue. When the crew collects, every item is photographed and given a code, and it appears in your portal with its picture, its name and its location. You can search it, star it, put it in sections, and see the whole inventory on one screen. A stored guitar is a guitar with a photograph you can find in five seconds, not a memory. And the portal lets you request delivery of one item, or disposal of one item, without touching the rest. The rule that keeps the archive honest: once a year, on a day you choose, open the portal and run the ownership test again down the list. Anything that fails now gets a disposal request. It takes an evening.

The version for a couple or a family

Minimalism in a household is a negotiation, and negotiations stall when the choices are keep or throw. A third choice, store, unblocks them. The record collection that one partner will not part with and the other will not have in the living room can be in a Medium plan, photographed, and the argument ends. Children's things are the same: the parent who cannot dispose of the first drawings and the parent who cannot look at another box of them both get what they want. In practice a family that goes this route holds a Medium plan, 24 boxes at 2,450,000 VND a month, and treats it as the family archive.

Where the idea stops

Storage is not a solution to shopping. If the flat fills again every year and the plan grows from Small to Medium to Large, the room test is not being applied at the door, and no amount of shelf elsewhere will help. It is also not a place for things you are avoiding a decision on: the box that has been in storage for two years because opening it is painful should be opened, on your terms, at home, one afternoon. Use the plan for what you would buy again and what you cannot buy at all. That is a smaller set than most people's possessions and a larger one than most minimalist writing admits.

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